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March 13th, 2019 01:00
Warranty, tech support, and PC problems
I have an XPS 15 (9570) purchased in Sept 2018 with Premium Support Plus. I paid the extra for this service because I'm a disabled senior citizen and not technically proficient. I thought remote service + in-home repair would work for me. The PC worked fine until 3/10 when I noticed just a bit of static in my speakers. Checked the SupportAssist app and saw a recommended audio driver update. Thought it might help, so downloaded it. Immediately on download completion the audio on my system died completely. Called the premium tech support number. Although the language barrier made it hard to understand much of what the tech supp lady said, it went okay because she mostly used remote access to my PC for the next 45 minutes during which she uninstalled, reinstalled, uninstalled, reinstalled the audio driver, installed previous restore points, was into the BIOS, doing safe boots, restarting the PC, etc. Nothing fixed it. She decided that my speakers were dead, and created a dispatch ticket for an in-home technician to replace them. On-site tech arrived today as scheduled. Again, language barrier, so I didn't understand much of what he said while in my home, but I tried to observe. After replacing the speakers, the problem was the same-no audio at all. He determined it was a bad driver. He did a bunch of stuff for about another 45 minutes and eventually I had audio back. However, as soon as he left, I found that Outlook 2016 was no longer working correctly. Tech support called me to check if the audio problem was fixed and I told him that now Outlook was malfunctioning. This was yet a third Dell tech guy to work on my PC over the last 3 days, and his accent was such that it was almost 100% impossible (for me) to understand. Unfortunately, the first thing he found was that remote SupportAssist was now inoperable too! He couldn't access my PC to work on it remotely, so I had to follow his phone instructions to the letter and do it myself. We spent at least an hour on the phone with me having to go into msconfig stuff, BIOS, restore points, uninstalls, reinstalls, etc. and having to ask him to repeat himself, spell words out one letter at a time, because I truly couldn't understand him. Even without the language difficulty, I was in way over my head and extremely uncomfortable with it, which I told him repeatedly, politely, and apologetically. End of the hour and still nothing was fixed and he still had no remote access. By then I was in tears from 3 days and many hours spent trying to talk with people I can't understand, and my PC being much worse than when this started on 3/10. He says my OS is corrupted. He's calling me back tomorrow and says we're going to have to reinstall Windows and do a factory reset, again with no remote access. He says I'll have to reconfigure all my settings (email, etc) and manually reinstall all my add-on software that I bought pre-installed from Dell. I ask how I'll reinstall something like Outlook without a license key. He says I'll have to call Microsoft and see if they will help me! All of these problems are precisely why I bought my software pre-installed by Dell and bought Premium Support Plus service. At this point, I want either someone to come to my home and put my PC back in working order, or replace this PC, including all the software pre-installed as originally purchased, or refund me my purchase price and I'll return this PC to Dell. I'm honestly not well enough to deal with this again tomorrow. Can anyone help?


DELL-Chris M
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March 13th, 2019 06:00
A PC exchange is only done after multiple different hardware failures have failed to correct the issues. Onsite techs do not install the operating system or software. All they do is replace hardware and install its driver. The suggestions by the onsite tech are valid and within Dell policy. The factory reset of the operating system will mean that you simply have to re-activate Office. Because you already created a MSA (Microsoft Account) tying you to Office, all you have to do is sign into the MSA to re-activate it.
This is done on your Windows desktop, not through a call to Microsoft. The factory reset will correct the SupportAssist issues.