Condemn Dell Computers!

From now on, I am condemning all Dell products and services. My one and only experience with Dell customer service left an extreme bitter taste in my mouth. Not only they are extremely unreliable, they are also unrepentent.

I was helping one of my executives to purchase a Dell laptop as a replacement. The supposed estimated time of arrival (ETA) given by Dell was stated as 23 December 2008. However the ETA lapsed and no one from Dell deemed it fit to contact us to say that a delay had occurred. And so, I had to call back the sales person to check on the status of the delivery. The worst part of the thing is that the sales person is extremely hard to contact. Numerous calls went unanswered. Emails were either not replied or were sent late. In short, it's a disaster.

Then Dell gave a second ETA as 5 Jan 2009. The day came and went and there's still no sight of the laptop at all. Yet again, calls went unanswered and emails were replied late. They were supposed to reply back to us on the status of the delivery by yesterday. However the stupid sales guy only sent out the reply today.

Again, the ETA was pushed back. This time round, the new date is 22 Jan 2009. The reason given is that they need to do a firmware update on the laptop and hence delivery will be delayed. It's very frustrating to keep getting news that the laptop is unable to arrive on time. Don't Dell install calendars and clocks at their offices so that they can be punctual to their own customers at the very least?

Dell people are rude in the sense that they never bother to get back to you on the status of the orders made and all the dates they proposed were eventually lapsed. By the time 22 Jan 09 comes, it will be yet another new ETA from Dell. I can bet my moolah on that.

Dell = untrustworthy and unreliable.

Nothing from them is worth the thousand dollars paid for the laptop. So, in future it would be everybody's best interests to avoid purchasing any products from Dell. I have written to Acer to check on their laptop stock instead. Hopefully everything goes well and the new laptop might just be on its way. I'm exhausted from all the chasing and there's no reward for doing all those tasks. It's quite meaningless actually. Even I don't get to use a proper desktop. My office laptop is a permanent loan unit and it sucks.

It only has 512MB RAM and this makes it slow to respond to commands. I try to minimise any heavy usage of the laptop but it will still hang sometimes. Crazy little fellow.

*sighs*

Now for Dell's Mini Laptop

This time round, Dell is releasing its own mini laptop into the world of UMPC. It's really amazing how fast competitors react the moment Asus released its EEE PC 701 last year. According to Gizmodo, he caught sight of a very small laptop that Dell's boss, Michael Dell, showed him after an interview.

So far, no further details has been released by Dell yet but we do manage to get some pictures of the small laptop.




So far, everything has been looking good for the UMPC world. Let's hope that pricing will be better after that disastrous Asus EEE PC 900. Hmmm, I do hope that Dell's laptops are good coz I heard that they are not quite reliable. It's gonna be a wait and see approach for me. =)