If you are a business, Dell has local service and board swaps. If you are a consumer they won’t do much more than give you the gears.

You have to admire Michael Dell for creating one of the largest computer companies in the world from his dorm room at University.

Dell took on everyone and beat them, everyone except HP and now ASUStek.

I always heard rumors about how bad their service so I stuck with HP. If an HP computer fails, they send you a new one the morning by Purolater or FedEx. That’s service.

Dell doesn’t do that. For home customers they just give you the run around.

Last winter I bought a Dell XPS 630i from Future Shop – my old computer was dying. Boy was that Dell fast. Everything went along great until the network card stopped working at 1 Gb.

Calling the service department, I spent 2 hours in a complex game of hide and seek with the tech who actually took remote control of my computer.

He discovered I knew how to configure and network and then announced. “We’ll have to replace the motherboard. But first you have to clean install Vista to see if that is the problem.”

I protested that was an ugly job but did it anyway. Still there was no 1 Gb nic. Some of my software is still not working but who has the time?

Summer over, I got back to the problem which really is only a minor thing. Saturday I was 3 hours with them on the phone. In the end all I had was a recording so I hung up.

Crazy call me crazy, I tried again yesterday. Same drill – the guy does remote diagnostics finds the card only goes to 100 Mb not 1000 Mb and announces the motherboard needs to be replaced. OK, I’d heard that before.

The problem is, Dell Service doesn’t work if you buy it retail. I would have to take the computer back to Future Shop. Let them play with it for 2 months and then get something back.

This is a known issue. The only fix is installing another network card.

I spent way too much time on this but I wanted to see what they would do without me yelling. The answer is nothing.

I never had to yell at HP. They were very nice. I think I should go back to HP or just build my own.

Dell doesn’t like ideas – Ideastorm

Dell has no way to email or communicate with them except something called Ideastorm.

I put a post called “Improve customer service to the same level as HP”

At first they were all excited, asked me to post it on Facebook.

Then the hammer dropped. Jackie the Ideastorm moderator said,

“Your post on Dell’s IdeaStorm, “Improve customer service to the same level as HP”, is not an idea; therefore, it has been removed. IdeaStorm is dedicated to the discussion of ideas and improvements related to Dell products and services and related technology.”

Good ideas like that aren’t worth much to Dell.