I bought a desktop on the DELL.com website for my son a couple of years ago and had to call them several times asking them to send me a recovery CD. When ordering the PC package a was offered a rebate if I would apply for a DELL "Preferred" account.
I applied online for the account, was approved immediately with a $ 7,500 credit line and never received the rebate.
After 2 months I paid the package off and called them to close the account. The lady (sitting in India asked me for my Social Security number and I told her that I had major concerns giving out my SSN orally over a phone line that is not secure, living in AZ, the state with the highest identity theft rate in the US. The lady refused to close the account and I wrote a letter to Dell's finance department. Dell has ignored this letter until today and the account with a $ 0.00 balance is still showing up in my credit report.
Every time I was told: "This PC can fix itself if something should ever go wrong, you don't need a recovery CD" After a few months the PC started to make a noise like a lawn mower, now it is about 2 years old and gives me a blue screen "unmountable boot volume" making it impossible to use the recovery CD that I obtained after several calls and complaints.
Obviously this is part of their strategy: the consumer pays for the microsoft software but does not get a CD. If something goes wrong with the computer, -and obviously these products are designed to fail after a certain period of time - the consumer has to buy the MS software besides replacing the harddrive... Making it uneconomical to fix the product.
Obviously these guys don't have any interest in selling something that lasts more than 2 or 3 years, knowing that the technology has reached a point where consumers believe that their PC is fast enough and don't have any desire to buy a new one. I still have my HP Pavilion (900 MHz, Windows ME) which is 6 years old, I have had some issues with it but I was always able to fix them, in some cases with the recovery CD. When calling their tech support I was told that this issue was very common but I had to pay them $ 45, - to diagnose it. (at that point I hung up)
It looks like the "more advanced" Dell computer that I bought for my son (1.8 GHz), Windows XP needs a new harddrive, making it eligable for the garbage can. I won't invest not even one dollar to keep Michael's piece of crap running.
My family won't ever buy a DELL product again, I am also going to talk to my boss and my friends about my experience with DELL.
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