Love Hate Relationship with Dell

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Dell has been the primary provider of commodity hardware in my current and last job.  At the NITC they were our primary provider of commodity servers, but the more exotic kit such as SAN, switching, and routing gear were left to field leaders in those areas.  I was extremely happy with their servers, we had great support, good pricing, and rock solid reliability.  At the KU School of Engineering Dell is the primary provider of all our IT systems including desktops, laptops, some switches, and all of our storage gear.  Again, I have been satisfied for the most part, though the prices and features for some of their re-branded storage kit has been painful.  The point of all that is that when it came to purchasing a replacement tablet for my girlfriend choosing a Dell Latitude XT series tablet seemed like a no brainer.  Wow, was that a mistake.  The entire experience has just been a nightmare.

 It started with the purchase process on their Website.  I haven't seen a more convoluted checkout process ever.  This is really quite impressive since I have regularly purchased products online for over a decade, but really, that is the least of my issues so far.  I dropped $80 on overnight shipping for the laptop on a Thursday at about 3:30 Central because it was critical to get her tablet replaced for school very quickly.  I knew I wasn't likely to get it by Friday, but I figured Monday at the latest.  Well I got shipping confirmation on Friday morning with an expected delivery date on Monday.  Sounded great, but Monday comes around and my tracking number says that the laptop hasn't shipped yet and there was no expected arrival date.  I double checked with Fed-Ex just in case their tracking information hadn't caught up.  It had, and they simply hadn't received the package from Dell yet.  So I call Dell, whose order tracking status still says shipped.  I patiently wade through their support menus and hold times till I speak to a representative.  

The representative apologized and said it should arrive in one to two days.  

I thought that was absolutely ridiculous and thought at the very least I could get my overnight shipping refunded since it was taking 4-5 business days to get an overnight rushed order.  At newegg, I could have ordered something with their free standard shipping and gotten it before Dell got me an overnight package.  The representative said that because of the weekend it was acceptable and that the arrival date was just an estimate anyway.  Fine.  I was mad, but I thought I'd just give them the benefit of the doubt, and if I hadn't received it the next day I'd be OK with paying the shippping--annoyed--but OK.

Sure enough it shows up the next day to their credit, and my frustration is appeased by the excitement of having a shiny new Dell laptop.

If only that were the end of this rant...if only...

The laptop comes with an external DVD-ROM and adapter, but low and behold, while the drive and the tray are in the box, the two don't fit together.  Worthless.  There is a SATA power/data adapter to fit the drive into the external bay, but of course this isn't included--appeasement fading.  Luckily my work is filled to the rafters with Dell gear, so I manage to get another external drive to fill in while I wait for Dell to send the missing part.  

After getting that part the next few hours are spent loading the software needed on the laptop.  Everything seems to working fine, I can touch the screen and I can click items using the pen.  As far as I was concerned everything was great.  This was of course until my girlfriend tries to actually use the pen to try and write something on the screen that evening.  She shows me, and I try it out, the pen input is absolutely worthless.  Input regularly cuts out, lags behind, and just generally doesn't work in any appreciable way.  Wonderful.

This leads to hours of firmware upgrading, driver upgrading, changing settings, and lastly changing to two other versions of Windows (Vista and 7) all with no luck.  This landed squarely in the land of hardware issue without any doubt, so I loaded up the Dell diagnostics to get error codes for giving Dell support.  I run the input device group of checks and it doesn't find errors with the digitizer, but does with the pointing stick (or nubbin' more informally).  That is odd, I know the digitizer is busted.  Well luckily the digitizer screen shows in real time what it thinks is happening, and boy howdy is it wrong.  Parts of the screen are missing, and every few seconds it switches from thinking the pen is there to thinking it is missing (even when the pen is sitting still on the screen).

So great, shipping delay without refund, missing parts, and a broken digitizer AND pointing stick.  Unbelievable.

There is hope I guess, I spoke with their tech support and was told that since this is so new I should just return it for a new one, so I'm going to try that tomorrow and we'll see how that goes, but I am notably not optimistic about that.  And besides, the whole point of this entire transaction is mooted, as my girlfriend now gets to go without a working laptop for three weeks by the time this all gets sorted out.

So although I've been mostly satisfied over the last 8 years I have used their products, an experience like this has seriously soured me on their current ability to provide the level of quality of service and equipment I have come to expect from them.