[lug] Laptop recommendations

[John Karns]

On Thu, 16 May 2002, rise said:

> Warning - Dell's field service guys are still good (contractors), but the
> rest of their service has gone to hell and the build quality is much lower
> than a year ago.  I know a few people who've had good experiences, but
> recently it's running about 3-to-1 horror stories to smooth sailing.
> This may have something to do with Michael Dell's Wall Street pleasing
> announcements that they were willing to do anything to cut costs,
> including sacrificing customer satisfaction.  I've got Next Business Day
> and it usually takes multiple calls and several days to get parts sent.
> At this point I'm averaging over a week for service calls including
> multiple instances of tickets never actually being opened, wrong parts
> being sent, defective hinges being classed as "cosmetic defect", attempts
> to replace the nice big screen with a 1024x768 as "equivalent", etc.  I'm
> avoiding Dell for laptops for a few years since these things tend to run
> in cycles and we're clearly headed down.  If you do go with them buy the
> extended warranty - mine has probably paid for itself thrice over by now
> (but then I got a lemon, YMMV).

Interesting .. and unfortunate:  I've been yearning for a 1.6 Ghz upgrade
from the 700 Mhz I have now, but maybe it's not such a good idea.  Also is
somewhat in line with a problem a friend is having with a recent order of
a 530 workstation.  Arrived with a different video and sound card than
specified, and when replacements finally arrived, they were the same model
as was shipped with the machine.  Also arrived with one monitor instead of
two as ordered.


> Dell is also a bit schizoid about Linux, when I call in about a hardware
> issues I often get at least one attempt to pass it off as "unsupported on
> Linux", which really doesn't fly when you're talking about a failed
> latch...

Also interesting, since they were selling the laptops with RH loaded.  How
can they say it isn't supported - perhaps your model was never offered
with Linux; not that it should excuse them.

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John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net