Dell AC Adaptor not recognized../sigh

I have been using Dell laptops since 1995ish ... And I've been through a few, was always loyal to Dell.

I have mixed experiences, some good, some not that good..

I'm a Norwegian Dell user, I just filed a report with the consumer protection bureau (forbrukerombudet) in Norway, regarding dell's practise.

I registered on this forum solely so I could make this post.

I'm not enraged and want to vent, but I want to see to that everyone who reads this post, and everyone who's a Dell customer gets treated fairly.

This is my expectation when I buy a product from any company: "That the product works as advertised, and that there's no sneaky features or restrictions that's not immediately noticeable or communicated"

There are work being done to standardize laptop chargers apparently, I've also read that the same applies to other electronic products (cell phone chargers etc.):

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/12/17/1422245/standardized-laptop-charger-approved-by-iec

First I would like to adress some of the comments in this thread.

1. Negative tone of OP. I do not find this offensive. To be honest, I do think he was quite calm, I've seen much worse. And he had the right to be upset. He only wanted a working device, and Dell put obstacle in his path to achieve this. If anyone of you happily accepts whatever big companies decides without hesitation and complaints, then you're all saints - and I admire you for that, but personally I do not want to waste my time with problems caused by other entities, that in all honesty they're responsible for.

2. The 'Dell never gave me a problem'-argument. This kind of argumentation is based on an emotional irational response. If somebody gets mugged in a particular street and complains about it, I could throw my hands in the air, and exclaim: "I never had an issue with this street, and it never gave any of my family any issues!" I think you understand, no need to elaborate on that.

3. "Other companies does not have a forum where you can complain"-argument. Might be true, I have not checked all company websites, but in all honesty, if a company is interested in running a good business, they're also willing to resolve issues with customers. If enough customers become angry, they will flock to other forums anyway, so I don't see why a company should not run an online forum.

There will be good people and bad people in a company, and many people are controlled by company policies and might not agree with it, so even good people might appear evil to the customer. However, it's the responsibility of the management to form the policies. And I would think it's economical incentives that's most often important, but shortsightedness in this department might hurt the bottom line long term, not everybody might understand that.

Here's an elaborate explanation of the problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Inspiron#Power_supply_issues

Quote: "Most Dell laptop computers have a special external power supply (PSU) which cannot be replaced by a third-party universal supply. The PSU has what's called UniqueWare™ Add-Only Memory, known under type DS2501. It is a parasitic power circuit memory chip connected to the center identification pin in the plug, via a 2m long unshielded wire alongside the PSU cable. This chip produces a special signal using a 1 wire communication protocol known as "1-wire" in identifying the PSU as an original Dell PSU. This chip handles all the data needed to authenticate a charge. If a power supply not made by Dell is used, or the cable near the connector becomes damaged as is not infrequent after some use, the PSU stops charging the battery and the CPU runs slower, although the computer can be used indefinitely so long as it remains plugged in. If this problem is present at startup, the message "The AC power adapter type cannot be determined. Your system will operate slower and the battery will not charge" is displayed. This will continue until the external PSU is replaced. A few third-party suppliers make power supplies with specific provision for Dell computers at lower prices than Dell's. It is possible to work round the slowdown, but not the battery charging, by installing a CPU clock utility.[15] On some models (the 9100 for instance), the problem can be worked around by starting the computer without a battery installed and fitting the battery after the computer has booted."

In my case, I had an adapter of an inspiron 1520 die on me, and i bought a replacement from a private seller, it had dell brand on it, but it was not recognized by the laptop, so it ran slow, i never really paid attention to the boot-message "The AC power adapter type cannot be determined. blah blah blah", I tought it was just due to the non-original adapter, and never paid much attention to it, and I noticed that the battery had problem charging as well. It did charge, but only a little bit, so I could only use the laptop for a few minutes without the power attached, kind of defeates the purpose of having a laptop... But since i mostly used it only at home, it was something i could live with. I noticed however that the laptop started running slower, and i tought it was just becoming older, and not running that well, i even opened it to remove dust to see if that helped. It never occured to me that Dell would deliberately punish me for not having an original power adapter attached to it. True, it had a boot message when I booted it from cold state, but I didn't do that often, and I thought it was just a fluke, just like the times when it said the laptop could not find the harddrive, and only way to have it work again was to unplug from ac, remove battery, and reboot it.

then the third party adapter failed, and i didn't use it for a while. In the attic I have a box of old computer parts, so I found an old adapter there, and lo and behold it worked. Same power output as the third-party adapter it replaced, and I hope it will restore the computer to its original working condition.

But there are several problems with the way Dell do business.

If a customer has his power adapter broken and needs to buy a new one, any should do as long as it is of sufficient quality and has the right power output. Of course, ideally it should use an original Dell power adapter, but come on, how much difference is there between a standard 3-rd party adapter and a dell adapter? Power is power, it can't be that much different.

Dells practise encourages e-waste, you can't simply use your gf's adapter, or an old one you have in your basement that belonged to some other laptop, and it is deterimental to the user experience because Dell deliberately SLOWS down the laptop, and prevents charging of the battery. Who gave Dell that power? I do not remember to grant them this power when I bought the laptop. Perhaps it was hidden somewhere inside some obscure TOS somewhere, but honestly, I just use devices I buy, I don't waste time reading all the legalese that some lawyers cooked up. I just expect the product to work reasonably well and to get service when and if I need it according to the warranty.

To take a car analogy, you buy model AA from company GreatCars. They have an agreement with supplier of gas, SplendingGas stations, and if you fill up your AA with gas from an AnotherGas station, your dashboard will tell you when you start up your car: "The performance of your car has been reduced, the gas-type cannot be determined blah blah"

Would people really accept that? I think not!

Locking the customer in to use only certain original parts is one thing, but forcing the user to be less productive (slowing down the system and refuse to charge the battery) is simply unacceptable and plain contempt towards the customer.

If Dell showed a message saying: "A non orginal power adapter is detected. We recommend you use an original adapter, and your warranty will be voided if you use a non Dell-adapter" and everything just worked fine, if the adapter gave the laptop the correct current, it would be much better.

I also question whether the power adapter itself is designed to die so that the customer will need to buy a new one, I don't have the resources to test this out, and neither have I checked it online, but I know for light bulbs this is true, they're produced to last for a shorter time period, so the consumers need to buy more.

From both a user experience problem, and from a sustainable development view of point, the actions of Dell are in my view very questionable and shortsighted.

And that's why I'm making this post.

As for me personally, exactly how much time and productivity I've lost as a result of this laptop running slower, and always having to bring the power adapter with me, effectively making the laptop nearly a stationary machine, I don't know - but surely it's non-trivial, and it will never be replaced or compensated.

Customers only want to buy products and use them. That's it. And when some errors arise, and the product is under warranty, they just want good service.

In another instance, I had a dell mini inspiron. As it happened, the power adapter was broken on that one as well, and I needed a new one, so I called dell. They asked me what the service tag was. I said I had no service tag, the customer rep proceeded to explain there was two ways to find it. 1. to look under the computer and 2. to boot the computer and look in the bios.

I explained to him that the placement of the service tag label under the mini had worn off, it was placed in such a manner, that continous use for a long time, having it on the lap, on the table etc had eventually erased all traces of this label, making it completely unreadable.

The service rep then said that, oh - well if it's not there, just boot the computer then and press...

I cut him short and explained to him that the power adapter was BROKEN, but he kept on going on the same script saying that he can't help without the service tag. I was really frustrated, and hang up on him.

Dell had created a system where the only way you could get service was if you had the service-tag, this was mandatory, yet they had created a netbook where the servicetag easily wore off, and combined with a power adapter that broke, this effectively bricked the entire system as it no longer was serviceable, but the only thing I really needed was a new power adapter.

I called Dell some more time, always going through the same stuff about me not having the service tag, I tried to explain the problem, with the servicetag being worn off beneath the system and the power adapter broken making it impossible to boot into the system to retrieve it.

No luck - eventually I got quite angry with the rep, and demanded that he contacted a supervisor and get back to me. They never got back to me...

So I ended up getting a non-orginal power adapter, but shortly thereafter we bought a macbook pro instead, so the netbook was put in a drawer.

to add insult to that story, when the mini first was bought, it showed 'out of memory' messages only by having just 3 programs open at a time, so I had to get back to the store and buy more memory and upgrade it myself, so the product sold was practically unusable without this upgrade, and to make the upgrade i had to find a tutorial on youtube about how to open the case and insert the memory, not something everybody would be comfortable with doing. So I think the system should not be sold with a minimum amount of memory to begin with.

I do realize that not everything can be perfect, but I do not think it's too much to be expected to expect companies to make products that actually works, and to handle customer cases in a good way.

And also the inspiron 1520 of mine sometimes locked up with a blue screen and the speakers giving a very nasty high pitched tone, before after some timeout the system eventually crashes and reboots. That kind of crashes would be extremely embarassing in public, as the only way of curing it would be to remove the power source and just cold turkey the entire system. I do think there should be some kind of safeguard in place so things like that could not happen.

Apart from this, I've run Dell's for many years, one of my first systems was Dell Latitude XPi P133ST, andI can't really remember having much of any technical issues with it, it just worked.

Perhaps quality of Dell products have declined, or perhaps not - but my lojality to Dell has suffered, and later when I need to buy servers, I will consider alternatives, and currently I'm not running any Dell-servers. Maybe that's irrational, but that's how I feel about it.

At another point I had a harddrive choke on a Dell laptop, and it was under warranty, so a driver was immediately on the door with a replacement (same business day), that case was impressive.

I do think though that the overall picture, does not speak well for Dell. At one point I also needed to replace the keyboard to the Mini I talked about, because it was spilled soda on it, and it would not work after that, I eventually got two replacement keyboards (just to make sure in case of more mishaps), but the process of going there was quite cumbersome and difficult.

I used the strategy of just skipping the chat session with whatever customer rep I was talking to, if they seemed to be non-cooperative. It was also a big issue for them that we lived in an other country than where we had originally bought the netbook. But after several ours of talking and learning what strategy worked best, I finally was able to order two spare keyboards to an american address.

It's incredible how unhelpful and bureacratic some of the customer reps are, hell I only needed keyboard replaced, but some reps even asked what OS i was running, and all kinds of other silly questions that was totally not relevant to the case.

I do not think it is too much to expect efficient, expedient service, having the actual issue resolved. The issue with the hdd was a good one where i called once, and got through to a service rep, explained the case, and 2 hours later the hdd was replaced. That's how it should be, always. I'm even patient in terms of delays and misunderstanding if good faith can be showed from the company rep, but when a company rep is rude and unhelpful, he's damaging the reputation of his company, and wasting everybody's time.

I've also been responsible for purchasing a lot of systems for family and friends, and I've stopped purchasing Dell products. If you piss of 100 customers, you might lose out on 500 sales.

I do not believe in shortsightedness and proprietary locked down systems that don't give the user freedom.

Now, this turned into quite the long rant, and it would most likely be classified as venting as well, but to OP, you're not alone, and I've shared your frustration on more than one occasion.

Naturally there are many far worse problems in this world, and perhaps we should all just accept all these small annoyances, don't pay too much attention to it, and just go on with our lives, but I do think honestly that all input is of value, and that if enough people talk up, companies will listen. Perhaps they will not listen to angry customers, but if their bottom line starts to decline, they will probably do whatever it takes to identify why it happens, and then complaints from customers might be a good lead.

Thank you, and have a great day!