Re: Poor Quality Laptops and Horrible Service

I am a technology administrator for an organization that has thousands of Dell laptops, and I can say, that they are absolute trash.

The hardware failure rate on these things is unbelievable. The Dell servers seem to work just fine, but the laptops, particularly the Latitude 3160-- my goodness-- are absolute trash. The LCD, system board, headphone jack, palm rest power button, system board power button, LCD cables, touchpads, keyboards, and LCD hinges, break non-stop. And the support is terrible. The techdirect program requires so many words per ticket just to get a part. They will deny parts requests if you don't properly troubleshoot a palm rest with a broken power button. It's broken, what sort of troubleshooting is required? So I'n usually forced to write some lengthy, passive-aggressive, sarcastic "troubleshooting" report for basic hardware requests and then they will send it if the word count is high enough.

We have problems re-imaging these systems all the time due to inscrutable BIOS settings that their engineers never understand. We are always 10 steps ahead of their tech support whenever we have problems with the Dell BIOS or the preboot environment, so we usually can figure it out after hours of configuration changes--- meanwhile, Dell has no idea what we're even talking about. 

I could go on, but the quality of Dell computers seems to be at rock bottom, and we may look back at this era as the beginning of the end for this company. We are currently phasing out of all Dell products and moving to Lenovo, which I would recommend highly.