Dell: Less Painful Than Expected

[kevin_standlee]

I finally opened a service call with Dell regarding the suspected bad motherboard in my hard-drive-killing laptop. As I expected, they initially suggested I do all of the things that I'd already done, like trying the "bad" drives in another computer, or cloning a different disk image. They also suggested doing a complete reinstallation from scratch, which I really didn't want to do because from all of the other tests done, it seems like it would be a complete waste of time.

Somewhat to my surprise, they agreed to replace the motherboard, and I should be hearing from a service technician in a few days. I'll probably have to do an installation-from-scratch after that, but I won't feel so bad about doing so then because it seems far less likely that the computer will simply eat the hard drive thereafter.

Comments

[janusfiles.livejournal.com]

How many times did you have to tell them the following sentence:

"Been there, done that."

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Only once, actually. I think I'd short-circuited some of that by listing all of the things I'd already tried. I'd neglected to mention the specific combination of things they suggested, although I had done it. I'm no stranger to computer troubleshooting. I can't say as I blame them suggesting it, though, as I've been on the other end of tech support myself and a default assumption of Stupid User isn't necessarily wrong. Whenever I go into a tech support situation, I recognize that Job 1 is convincing support that I really do know a bit about what I'm doing.

[janusfiles.livejournal.com]

Did you tell them everything you had tried at the beginning? Seems to me that it would have saved time for everyone involved.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Yes, I told them everything except the one thing they asked me to do, which I'd forgotten to tell them. Once I told them that I'd done that, they scheduled the service call.

[readsalot.livejournal.com]

Last year I had to convince Dell support that my laptop keyboard was broken (there were a bunch of keys not working.) The painful part was when the person insisted on taking over my computer, and then scrolling through (not searching, just page-at-a-time scrolling) an enormous PDF with technical details on the machine. Eventually they agreed that it really was broken, and they overnighted me a box in which to send them the computer, and I sent it and got it back within 2 days.

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

I appreciate tech support telling me the obvious because I have very little tech knowledge and often miss something that could fix the problem.