Dudes, where’s my Dell?
I know, I know. I ordered a Dell laptop on July 30. It’s less than one week later. But how long does it take to slap a 1 Gig stick of RAM into a laptop and replace the battery with a better one? The Dell homepage tells me it’s still “in production” and the very latest it’s going to ship is Aug. 20.
I managed to gobble togeter bits and pieces of two non-working desktops. The result is a Windows 98 box with more than 400 Megs of RAM with a NIC card that drops a heck of a lot of pings. I don’t dare load any software onto the thing.
I tend to multi tast and this monstrocity doesn’t like having more than two browser windows open. Firefox doesn’t work right in it either, so no tabbed browsing.
Needless to say, I am not a happy blogger.
But that’s OK, dude, ’cause I’m getting a Dell. Eventually.
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
I can sympathies. Lat year when I bought my HP Laptop from Office Depot it took 6 weeks to arrive. Then to make things even worse when I submitted my request for the $500 rebate they denied the request because it was not filed before the deadline which was 1 week before I received the actual laptop. I’m still fighting with them.
That’s funny (because, of course, it’s happening to someone else). Good luck fighting The Man.
I gave up on Dell several years ago after their tech support went to hell.
Circuit City has had some killer deals on Toshiba laptops the past few weeks.
See article on Dell laptop delays from PC World:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135400/article.html
My experience with Dell is one day it says “in production” and the next day it ships. Both of my laptops shipped before estimated ship date. Then again maybe I am just lucky.
or here in ComputerWorld:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=windows_and_linux_pcs&articleId=9028722&taxonomyId=64&intsrc=kc_top
Good news. I didn’t order a XPS M1330 (the laptop being delayed). I ordered a plain old Inspiron 5101.
I had two different Dells, from, I think, 1994-2000 and 2000-2007. The last one died a few months ago and I bought a Gateway. While the Dell’s were generally ok, the phone support totally sucked. I don’t know who I will speak with if I need to call Gateway support, but when calling Dell’s, you get a person in India trying their hardest not to sound Indian, making it worse. NONE of those people have a clue what they are doing, they just follow a syllabus, then pass you on to somebody else who knows even less. No thanks.
I’ll have to second JW’s experience with Dell’s customer service. It REALLY stinks.
My wife has a “complete care” guarantee on her laptop – a necessity with 4 small children. We had to invoke that recently and it took over a month to get the whole computer back. We got the hard drive back first – about a week before the rest of it showed up. This is after my wife spent HOURS (literally) on the phone prodding them to get her computer back.
We’ve had similar problems dealing with them previously, and it seems to be getting worse, not better. I will never purchase a computer from Dell again.
I just bought my second Dell (first one was in 2000) a few weeks ago. I ordered it on a Sunday, selected the el-cheapo ground shipping, and the box was at my doorstep when I got home from work that Wednesday. I’ve had good experiences with their tech support, aside from the wait times. I guess YMMV….
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