We dropped Dell after almost 30 years of exclusive use for our desktops, laptops, and server/storage infrastructure.
They can never seems to get their shit together.
Going public and then back to private. We stuck with them through that, even though it was a shitshow trying to get a hold of anyone. They blur together, but this might have also been the time when they offered everyone the opportunity to leave and it was a ghost town at Dell.
We stuck with them when they outsourced their support, which we later realized was the best years of support. More on that in a sec.
Outsourced support turned out to be better because we could triage everything ourselves, then tell them which piece of hardware was broken and they would send a tech or replacement part. Basically exactly what we expected for when we purchased premium support.
We stuck with them when they brought their support back to the US. Each tech person wanted to make a career out of each ticket. We couldn't get broken hardware fixed without screaming and begging.
Keep in mind, we always bought the best hardware with the most expensive support level. Precision laptops. Precision desktops. Best servers and storage.
We tried to stick with them when their sales teams basically wanted to remind us every time they don't really want to talk to anyone anymore. Everything is done online and they prefer not to talk to anyone.
We tried to place an order for a laptop refresh, which was going to be followed by desktop refresh, and then a complete server/storage refresh. The sales teams made it seem like they were doing us a favor by even quoting us anything. More reminders to use the customer portal and don't call or e-mail us. That was the final straw and we did the complete refresh with a different brand.
> We stuck with them when they brought their support back to the US. Each tech person wanted to make a career out of each ticket. We couldn't get broken hardware fixed without screaming and begging.
The people I talk to doing laptop repairs and trying to get parts from Dell say that Dell is treating them like potential scammers. They've diagnosed the broken part, everything is under warranty, Dell was previously fine with trusting these people.. But now Dell is forcing them to prove, every time, that the part needs to be replaced.
It's the weirdest combination of time wasting and incentivizing this team to be _lower_ skilled that I've ever seen. Because, I'm guessing, Dell was dealing with too much warranty waste and decided to crack down on everyone.
> Because, I'm guessing, Dell was dealing with too much warranty waste and decided to crack down on everyone.
If that’s the case, then it’s further mismanagement from Dell.
All of the parts get refurbished and go back into circulation. Not in a secretive way. Dell points out that replacement parts for warranty claims might be a refurbished item.
> Everything is done online and they prefer not to talk to anyone.
There was a time where even this was fine as Dell Premier was actually functional. When the bottom fell out of that part of their service we left for good.
CDW had better Dell support than Dell did. :|
What did you stay for 30 years?
Overall, it wasn't terrible, until it finally was.
We had pretty good luck with the hardware. Some refreshes were better than others. We would refresh about every three years when technology was rapidly changing. Then hardware got really fast and it would last longer. We always bought maxed out specs, which meant we could push the life of the hardware. The Precision series was pretty good. Some models had problems and others were rock solid. We always had spares on purpose, which I think helped save our sanity when dealing with Dell support.