back to article Dell XPS support takes a catnap

Dell's XPS Premium Support service database servers were down for four hours on Thursday and two on Friday, according to a Register source, making the company's "24x7" support promise moot. A Reg reader who called the service to report a dead motherboard on his Dell XPS 720 - which was under warranty - was told that his …

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  1. muttley
    Grenade

    That'll be the dead nVidea GPU then?

    XPS 1330 => 3rd motherboard (and 2nd HD) in 15 months here.

  2. pAnoNymous
    FAIL

    XPS Support Is Pants

    Their XPS online support has not worked a single time I've tried it and I dreaded being put through to XPS support telephone support department as it guaranteed a much longer wait than all their support departments. Premium, go figure.....

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    Dell should consider...

    opening a service center on Mars. The wait times would be better and the support personnel would be easier to understand.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Premium? Who said?

    XPS live chat - Hasn't been functional in 2 years afaik.

    XPS Email support - Average response time is 3 days

    XPS Telephone Support- Minimum time to log a call to replace a motherboard on my XPS has been 75mins (first time took 3 attempts - I kept giving up after an hour on hold each time)

    3 motherboards in 2 years on my 1330 plus a keyboard and a mains adapter. I'm about to log a call for a fourth replacement when I have a couple of hours to waste because this time the ethernet port is faulty on the one that was replaced last month.

    Oh, and last time I called the 24x7 XPS premium support line I was greeted with a recording telling me they're only open 10am to 8pm Mon-Fri.

    I'll get my coat and never buy another Dell.

  5. camelCaseJackAss

    Blame it on the cow

    Yeah he tripped over the lines!

  6. david flacks
    FAIL

    PS

    oops, my memory must be as bad as the stuff Dell are supplying in their new servers. As well as the 3 MBs, PSU and Keyboard, I had the DVD drive replaced as well in July.

    The only part of this XPS that's original now is the screen and the HD.

  7. James O'Brien
    FAIL

    Heh

    Nice to see you doing an article that doesnt revolve around Apple Rik.

    Dells support for anything has sucked ass since as far back as I can remember. Few years ago I sent back a laptop that popped its cogs and needed a MB replaced...3 weeks later I get it back in the exact same condition I sent it in. They didnt seem to believe me when i told them it was never repaired. Not to mention troubleshooting everything I could that i knew they would ask so I could speed up the support call. After 45 minutes of arguing with them I ended up having to spend another 3 hours with India doing the same BS all over.

    Never getting another Dell until support is back in a place where I can actually understand someone.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Not surprised

    Last time this happened was when they upgraded the system.An hour afterthe upgrade it all fell over and agents were left telling folk they couldn't log their calls. This was ont he Friday and wasn;t sorted till late on Saturdya. Turns out that once the guys had finished the upgrade they all pissed off to the pub and couldn't be reached.

    And I'm not surprised hat calls are taking forever, Dell Tech Support used to be about getting the problem solved as quickly as possible to ensure that no one was kept waiting in the queue. Then some bright spark executive decided the best way to measure performance was how long the techs were n the phone and came up with a metric that said you had to spend 75% of your working day on the phone. this meant of your 8 hour day you had to spend 6 hours on the phone. They also included your lunch and teab breaks on the phone, giving you a total of half an hour for the whole day to do your admin work. So this meant that to reach the metric, agents had to keep you on the phone as long as they could.

    to put it in perspective, and agent who can handle 20 calls a day is deemed less productive than an agent who handled only 5 but spent an hour on each call.

    i eventually got canned after being so stressed trying to reach their targets I inadvertently muttered something derogatory about a customer under my breath that they heard. So despite being the highest call taker int he building with the best customer satisfaction rate I was escorted out of the building.

    From what I've heard from people who still work there it's just gotten worse.

    As the BOFH would say, the beancounters are in charge and no one's safe.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    No title required

    Dude you got a screwed!

  10. Matthew 4
    FAIL

    hah!

    well you do kind of deserve it for buying dell.

    I can't really see any good reason for getting an XPS, if its laptop gaming you are wanting, and have that kind of money to throw around then why not get an Apple or Sony?

  11. BadInfluences
    Unhappy

    Not as rare as you would think...

    I used to work at Dell's US based call center for US Business owned PCs. It was neither rare nor unusual for the whole DellServ system to be down. Happened about once a month, up to a full day. We quite often had to keep taking calls, writing them down on paper and punching them into dellserv when it came back up. We were expected to do this while recieving non-stop calls at the same time. Needless to say, quite a few support calls would get lost in the confusion. As for wait times, I was in the XPS queue at one point. Late at night (10pm - 1am-ish) we would have 5 or 6 people supporting every business owned XPS in the united states. The queue regularly got to 1 hour, 30 people deep. Occasionally they got to 1.5 hours. There really was nothing we could do except dump them out to overseas XPS support when we finally closed the seriously understaffed queue. There are more horror stories (commonly, the overseas support was so poorly trained to parrot what they read, that they would see certain models of inspiron and send them to the XPS queue, because some XPS were the exact same, just rebranded.)

  12. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Hahahahahaha

    Humungous FAIL for Dell - they should get their servers from a reliable manufacturer not that shit they expect us to buy.....

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Well

    That's what people deserve for buying inferior computers...Dell has always sucked, and only the PC lemmings that populate this site don't seem to realize it...perhaps next time you should buy the most reliable and best supported of personal computers, aka Apple Macintosh...go figure.

  14. Pete 6
    FAIL

    @ Matthew 4

    An Apple for gaming? LOL

  15. Beritknight
    Thumb Up

    @people suggesting Apple or Sony

    Apple and Sony both do Return To Base warranties, with turn-around times measured in weeks. The Reg reader referred to in this article had to wait an extra business day, so he got his machine fixed in 2 business days, not the one business day that the warranty promised.

    I agree that it sucks that Dell dropped the ball on this one, and that the customer didn't get what he was promised. That's bad. That said, even when Dell screwed up so badly that there's an article in The Register about it, he still got his computer fixed in 2 business days. Not the two weeks it took me last time I tried to get an Apple fixed under AppleCare - an AppleCare protection plan that cost significantly more than the 2nd and 3rd year warranty extension on a comparable XPS.

    So that's what I don't get. How does it make sense to tell someone that instead of their crappy XPS with it's crappy Dell support he should have instead purchased something else that *still wouldn't be fixed today* if the same thing had gone wrong with it? Why would that be a good thing?

  16. Steven Jack
    Happy

    In fairness

    I own a Dell XPS M1530 laptop and while this was a small issue, my power adapter died and XPS support were great, yes it was India and a bit scripted but it was fast and they just sent me out a replacement adapter and I received it next day.

    Fingers crossed I don't have any more major issues, but I really like the hardware and have to say I think the support is ok, I'm not sure where I would go for a better level of service.

  17. James O'Shea
    Troll

    @ Pete 6

    At least it wouldn't fall over as quickly or as often as a Dell...

  18. DPWDC

    @muttley

    Same story here, I called XPS last monday, they said they'd send an engineer out to replace my motherboard again (graphics chip problem this time) the next day, still waiting now. Keep getting phonecalls saying they don't have the motherboard in stock yet... Not impressed.

    They've extend the warranty on M1330s by a year in a Microsoft RROD style apparantly.

  19. TeeCee Gold badge
    Thumb Up

    @Pete 6 Re: @ Matthew 4

    I dunno what was funnier there, that or that the other alternative offered was a Sony. About the only thing you can get with tech support that makes Dell look good.

    LOL indeed.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Dell support sucks

    I had a number of friends that swore by Dell and I got an XP box by them and it worked just fine. My Dad decided to finally take my advice and go with a Dell and went with a Vista one. Well it didn't work properly from the get go. McAfee was loading up twice on boot up, the dvd burning software was giving an error saying it was not compatible with Vista and on trying to fiddle with the machine, an Ms expert friend of mine was suggesting it sounded like it had a virus as it wasn't working properly.

    I had to upgrade firmware on the BIOS and dvd drive, together with reinstalling the OS completely. I needed the correct Vista version of the drivers from the web, not what Dell provided. The help that came with the machine seemed incorrect too. I was following guides on Vista and then suddenly it was talking about XP.

    In the end the HD packed up and I had to call Dell support and the nice woman, who to be fair was just doing her (probably) scripted job, got me to run through some tests to tell me it was software, not hardware and that she'd put me through to the software department. At which point, I gave up as I'd already wasted an hour of my time and I knew it was hardware.

    A new HD in the machine worked fine for ages until recently so I think it's a motherboard issue. My Dad decided he would just go out and buy another Dell (Why I don't know?!) in the meantime as he couldn't wait for me to be free to help again. That's now got some issues too - admittedly software this time but there's just no peace with Dell machines, it seems.

    My brother, completely disregarding my advice to NOT get a Dell, went and got an XPS and that's had a number of issues. I've had to reinstall the OS about 3 or 4 times now, I've lost count. However, by some fluke his HD failed the tests when on the phone with them and they have now replaced the drive.

    Suffice to say that when I brought my last PC, I, having been turned to a fan of Dell machines at one point, avoided them with a barge pole. Have absolutely no faith in Dell at all now.

  21. Equitas

    Applie support?

    AC writes "perhaps next time you should buy the most reliable and best supported of personal computers, aka Apple Macintosh...go figure." No factory-approved services within 150 miles of me :-(

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