Need assistance

[Bart Silverstrim]

Dirk Freitag wrote:
> CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
>> Derek Broughton wrote:
>>> CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
>>>
>>>> Karl F. Larsen wrote:
>>>>>     My advice is to take the Laptop back to where you bought it and get
>>>>> all your money back. It's clear Dell has no idea how to fix the WiFi and
>>>>> that is criminal! If they sell it as having WiFi you can take them to
>>>>> court.
>>>> Why recommend a "shoot first and ask questions later" strategy first?
>>>> It's needlessly antagonistic and certainly does nothing to advance the
>>>> cause of Linux at Dell.
>>> Because Dell is criminally irresponsible about support.
>> Hyperbole. Good luck in suing Dell for being "criminally irresponsible".
>>
>>>> Never attribute to malice that which you can attribute to mere
>>>> incompetence. I don't think it's a deliberate policy at Dell to not 
>>>> support the Ubuntu they bundle with some of their machines. 
>>> I KNOW it's deliberate policy at Dell to simply not support the machines
>>> they sell - with Ubuntu or Windows.
>> That has not been my experience.
>>
>>>> There is no way that 
>>>> Dell would have bundled Ubuntu with anything if they couldn't support it.
>>> LOL.  I might as well just quit for the day, because I won't be reading
>>> anything that funny again.  Dell's policy is to offer to support
>>> practically anything, charge you for it, and then ignore you when you try
>>> to hold them to it.
>> Again, that has not been my experience. At a school that I'm helping,
>> they have ~50 Dell machines and one server. There was an amber light
>> flashing on the front panel of the server and not knowing anything about
>> Dell servers, I called their support line. They spent a considerable
>> amount of time on the phone with me, at no cost to me other than my
>> time, to install diagnostic tools, run the diagnostic tests, and to
>> analyze the output of the tests. It turned out to be a dead CMOS
>> battery, which they offered to ship to me but I thanked them and told
>> them I could source one locally. It was only after they helped me deal
>> with the problem that I was told the warranty on the server had expired
>> a month prior. It's entirely possible that they were so helpful because
>> they wanted the school to extend the warranty on the server, which the
>> school did, but what difference does it make why they behaved as they
>> should have? If they did the right thing because of a profit motive,
>> then the system was working exactly as it should have been.
>>
> 
> As with any company, they will treat their commercial customers entirely 
> differently than their residential ones.  I had a Dell laptop that was 
> having issues booting.  I called Dell for support, and they were very 
> unhelpful and wanted to charge me at a point for their support.  I 
> called from the business that I worked for, and gave them my company's 
> Dell partner number, and they gave me the best support and resolved the 
> issue in 20 minutes.  At no cost.

As I don't work for Dell, so I don't know for sure, but I think they are 
two different divisions handling things. I imagine the business-oriented 
groups are geared for tech and administrator people calling with issues 
while the home division gets a lot of "my modem makes screech noises" 
and "Does the round thing go in the round hole thing and the square one 
go into the square hole thing?"-type questions. Not that it's an excuse, 
just that calling the education support for repairing servers has given 
me good results, and I don't own a Dell so I don't know what their home 
division is like. I simply imagine that support for home users is 
extremely extremely expensive for them and most of their calls are 
support calls for things not their fault, like supporting third party 
accessories and software people try adding to their computer that they 
paid four or six hundred dollars for while businesses are paying for 
labs and office-loads of systems at a time and have people calling after 
hopefully having a good handle on the situation to begin with or at 
least know the difference between logging into the computer and opening 
a web browser and typically not calling because WoW drops frames at peak 
times on the network.