On Thu, 07 Apr 2011 09:04:16 +0100, Invisible wrote:

>>> So it *is* a sucker tax then.
>>
>> It depends.  If you purchase through, say, EMC, what you're paying the
>> 'big bucks' for is the service contract, which in my experience is
>> worth its weight in gold.
> 
> This is presumably why all Dell products are 7x the price of any other
> supplier. Which would be great, if their service contract was worth its
> weight in paper clips. But it isn't.

My experience has differed.  I had a laptop (for example) in a class that 
had a hard drive failure - I called Dell support and they overnighted me 
a replacement hard drive so I could get the student working the next 
day.  Not as good as "a tech is on the way", but we paid for overnight 
service and got it.

> Hypothetically, in the event of a hardware fault, they're supposed to
> come over here and fix it within 4 hours. In reality, in the event of a
> hardware fault, THEY DO NOT GIVE A DAMN. They're just not interested.
> You file a trouble ticket and NOTHING HAPPENS. You call them, they take
> down all the details, and NOTHING HAPPENS. They don't lift a finger to
> help you in any way at all.

Do you have an account manager with them?  I know some companies do have 
service account managers/technical account managers (not sure what the 
Dell analogue is), but if you are a named account for them, then you 
should be able to escalate the issue, since that's what your company is 
paying for.

And if you don't get what you're paying for, then it's time to look to 
another supplier or to raise holy hell with the supplier you're dealing 
with.

That said, I have heard that there are *huge* disparities in how Dell 
deals with US customers vs. customers outside the US - so your issues 
aren't unique to the best of my knowledge.

Jim

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