Are Dell Notebooks really that bad?

[nin137]

hey guys,
on my other post i was asking for suggestions on laptops and have finally narrowed it down to D610 Latitude or 630M Inspiron. Then I decided to head over to CNET and check product reviews, and much to my shock I noticed that about 90% of customer reviews were negative.
The biggest complaint was that, "the tech support is impossible to understand and is of little to no help" something i figured considering it has been outsourced.
So my question is; is Dell really that bad, or am I just seeing a bias, in that only people who are angry are going to reply to those reviews?
I figure this is a somewhat 'neutral' ground for that question.
Thanks!

[Statica]

Product-wise Dell brings out very good laptops, the D610 has been highly reviewed by customers as well on CNet. About tech support, your mileage may vary; most knowledgeable people dont really use phone tech support anyway, no matter who speaks on the other line, it's going to be from a script that is usually not going to help very much. If it's a hardware issue, Dell has been great at taking care of the issues for me anyway.

[mairving]

I have about 10-12 Lattitudes usually D505-D610's at work. Very few problems with them. I had to replace a motherboard on one and another had a bad hard drive. I always order the Lattitudes over the Inspirons because they have a docking station and come with a 3-yr warranty as opposed to the Inspirons which usually have a max of 2 years.

I am getting ready to order either a D610 or one of their Precision laptops for myself.

[PCBrandon]

I just ordered an Inspiron 9300 w/ a 3 yr warranty. I did a lot of research, and received tons of help from thefultonhow on this board. I can't tell you how excited I am while waiting for the laptop to arrive. I should be getting it around Friday next week.

I've called Dell support six or seven times for my school. They are always excellent, especially if you know what you are doing. I have learned pretty well and can get a replacement part on the way to the school the next day without the Dell representative asking more than a single question as far as the troubleshooting goes.

[LaptopExtreme]

I'm not a fan of DELL, but have been when I was an IT Admin. Its just that the quality have gone down plenty, including support. I can't even understand them anymore and more importantly, they can understand me either. They keep putting you on hold, i dont know why, maybe their looking things up in the dictionary.
As for equipment, I prefer Lattitude. It's smaller and lighter, but more expensive. Inspirons are big, fat, and heavy. Think they make good Desktops.

[mairving]

Originally Posted by LaptopExtreme I'm not a fan of DELL, but have been when I was an IT Admin. Its just that the quality have gone down plenty, including support. I can't even understand them anymore and more importantly, they can understand me either. They keep putting you on hold, i dont know why, maybe their looking things up in the dictionary. As for equipment, I prefer Lattitude. It's smaller and lighter, but more expensive. Inspirons are big, fat, and heavy. Think they make good Desktops.

Not all of the Inspirons are fat and heavy. Some are quite similar to the Lattitude but don't have docking capability. I believe the m series of Inspirons are quite similar in style to the Lattitudes.

I haven't really seen that the quality has gone down. There are some blips on occasion though. On the corporate side of things which you say that you are from, they still use support people in the US which is a little better. I usually do most of my stuff via email. Just run the diagnostics and if the part fails they will send you a new one pretty easily.

[thefultonhow]

My personal support experience with Dell has been positive overall, although not completely. My video card was causing my Inspiron XPS Gen 2 to reboot randomly. I called up twice; the first time the tech didn't do much troubleshooting and blamed my reboots on the fact that I had installed the chipset drivers from Intel's site instead of Dell's. I hung up and called back later that day and got a very helpful tech who ran through troubleshooting steps for a couple of hours, and then decided to send me a new laptop.

Both times, the tech support people were Indian, so I don't think that has impacted service as badly as people say. They definitely had accents, but I could understand them fine, and the second guy was very good, so I really don't have much of a complaint. Plus, although I had to call up a couple of times to get it, I got a $200 discount because of the problems I had.

My high school has switched from Dell laptops to IBM ones because we got tired of dealing with Dell support, but that's mostly because we had to send them back to a repair depot, whereas we have an authorized IBM repair facility about 20 minutes away from us. We are still using Dell desktops because we don't really have that many problems with them, so support is not an issue at all.

[mairving]

Originally Posted by thefultonhow My high school has switched from Dell laptops to IBM ones because we got tired of dealing with Dell support, but that's mostly because we had to send them back to a repair depot, whereas we have an authorized IBM repair facility about 20 minutes away from us. We are still using Dell desktops because we don't really have that many problems with them, so support is not an issue at all.

Funny because when I send a Dell off for repair they send it down the street for repair. I nearly always get it back the next day. Last one I sent off had the bad motherboard in it. The CD drive worked on it but the plastic cover on the side was loose. They replaced the whole CD drive too even though I didn't ask them to.

[LaptopExtreme]

If i was the guy down the street, I'd do that for you too. They just bill Dell for it.