I purchased a Dell Dimension 8100 three years ago and have had nothing but problems from the beginning. Less than a year after the purchase, the hard drive completely fragged out and would not boot. After exhaustive efforts dealing with Dell's support department, they finally sent an independent repairman to fix the problem.
A year or so later, the same thing happened again. Again, forever on the phone with Dell and eventually another repairman. I asked the repairmain if this was a common problem, as it was the second time in two years this had happened to my system. He told me that this was the most common hardware problem he encountered... *especially* on the 8100 series. I held my breath that this fix was for good.
Not so. Last summer/fall - same thing. I began getting messages at boot-up that the hard drive was out of specification and that I should back everything up immediately. This continued sporadically for a few weeks. At that point, the computer would boot as far as the Windows "splash" screen and the lock up.
At that time it was my utter misfortune to discover that Dell had moved all technical support offshore to Manilla. I can't describe the ridiculous things the tech support people asked me to do (when I could understand them), but it was obvious that they knew nothing about tech support and were working from a check-list.
My warranty was quickly running out, so I made every effort to get this resolved before it cost me any more money. Finally, after MANY hours on the phone with them and complying with the "unplug this" and "re-seat that", they sent me a replacement hard drive.
Unfortunately, the drive they sent was defective. As soon as power was applied, it began making grinding noises as it went into a continuous loop of "seeking" and banging the head back and forth. Back to Dell "tech support"...
Again, MANY hours and a lot of check-lists, unplugging, re-seating, etc. They sent yet another drive with the IDENTICAL defect.
At this point, I tried working with the "resolution center". This wound up being more phone-tag than anything and accomplished nothing. I did manage a conversation with a real person, who assured me the problem would be fixed. I made a point of telling her that my warranty would soon expire and time was of the essence.
A third drive arrived WITH THE SAME PROBLEM! At this point (months after it all began), I was desperate to get the system up and running, so I bit my lip and went back to "tech support". I really wish i would have kep accurate track of this time I spent on the phone with them since it all started, but I didn't. Suffice it to say that the total time was *easily* in excess of 50 hours— including one marathon day of almost 9 HOURS.in the end, the computer would NOT EVEN MAKE IT TO THE BOOT SCREEN before locking up.
I finally gave up on Dell and at Christmas asked my cousin to take a look at it. He is very knowledgeable about hardware, etc. And has built systems from scratch for people including me.
He did absolutely everything possible to fix it - including flashing the bios to the most current version, tearing down and rebuilding everything and downloading the diagnostic program from the hard drive manufacturer. He got it to the point of being able to boot and tested another hard drive to be sure it wasn't an IDE problem. He stated that he had never heard a hard drive make noises like that and pronounced them "junk".
The upshot of all of this is that my computer is still unusable, my warranty has expired and Dell is trying to bill me for the three junk drives they sent (at $175 a pop, no less). I have since returned the drives to them for credit and have all but given up hope that they will make good on the warranty.
I reported them to the BBB (useless, I know) but have very little recourse in this situation. My final call to "tech support" was at the request of my cousin who said they should send a pre-formatted and tested drive with an install disk (if necessary). Big surprise - Dell refused.
So, next time you go shopping for a computer, keep in mind that Dell apparently has no problem selling computer with KNOWN defects (as the repairman told me), that their "tech support" is barely fluent in English and UTTERLY USELESS, that their "Resolution Center" doesn't resolve anything and that they will do everything possible to stall if you're almost out of warranty. Next time you hear "Dude, you're getting a Dell", just say "No thank you".
I guess that I shouldn't be surprised... I only recently found out that Dell was nearly bankrupted a few years ago because they were building and selling new computers with USED PARTS!
Kerry
normal, Illinois
U.S.A.
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