DO NOT BUY DELL!!

Once upon a time, there was a computer company called Dell. They would do things like sell you a system, and fix it for you when it was broken. They were awesome. Of course, they were more expensive, but for those of us who have no time to begin with, the ability to put our computer in a box, ship it away, and have it come back all better in a few days was TOTALLY worth it.

I purchased a new Dell laptop for my husband (home use) in mid April.

It stopped booting on October 7th. That’s six, count them 6 fricking months. We placed our first call to tech support October 8th.

The tech misdiagnosed the problem – he didn’t even try to diagnose from what I can tell. He didn’t teach John how to boot in safe mode or anything. He just said, paraphrased: “It’s a software issue. We’ll send you an XP disk that we should have shipped with your laptop initially but, whoops, sorry.” (Oh, and they’ve sent a $99 bill to us now, because we’ve called about software problems.)

We waited til Thursday, the 14th, to find out where the disk was. “Whoops, we forgot to send it again. Shucks. It’ll be in the mail next week.”

We got the disk and placed a second tech support call on the 22nd. By this point, I had actually gotten onto the machine in safe mode to find, well, golly friggin gee, the event log says BAD SECTOR all over the place. That sounds like software to me, all right, boyo. NOT!

The second tech agreed. This was a bad sector on the hard drive. And yes, we had paid extra for next-day on-site tech support for hardware failure, but what do you know, if you read the frigging fine print, that doesn’t include something the owner can do himself, like replace or repair a bad hard drive. Yessir. My husband is all over that rebuilding a disk stuff.

So, the 27th comes, and no goddamn hard drive in the mail, and no note from fed ex, ups, or dhl. I decide to take matters into my hands. I totally REAMED the tech support dudes. I mean, I’m sure these guys are going to the temple and calling Shiva’s wrath on my head about now. But goddamn it, they f’ed it up. Big time. They never sent the hard drive. Some Idiot cancelled the order because the tech support dude didn’t get proper “supervisor permissions”. And they NEVER checked to see if the customer (that’s me) was ok.

Oh, and on top of all this, Joseph (at least, that’s what he SAID his name was) had the utter nerve to tell me that he couldn’t do any more for me because the piece of shit he sold me didn’t break in 120 days. Oh, it lasted 177 days. That’s so much more in the life of a laptop.

I swear, if phones came with remote bitch-slap, he’d have two black eyes, a disjointed nose, and ringing in his ears.

We’re still waiting – though DHL says they have a package that’s supposed to come today. Of course, though we have a standard laptop, they won’t image the hard drive for us. Or give us a fake-o tech reason that they won’t image it for us. They’re just going OUT of their way to piss me off to the nth degree.

My lesson is this, in case you’re missing it: Don’t by from Dell. They’re stingy, stupid, greedy, incompetent jackasses who don’t deserve to be in business anymore.

Please feel free to mail a link or this text to anyone you think might ever buy a computer. You’re better off going to best buy – you get the same level of service at ½ the price.


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