XPS 700 Delay 7

Geez. ChrisM is up late!!

Get some sleep ChrisM :) It's 2am EST ! :D LoL :)

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@Anonymous-ChrisM wrote:
The XPS 700 Delay 6 thread is in the FAQ.

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Doesn't anyone sleep around here? :smileyvery-happy: Get some sleep Chris.

Another important GBAKMARS post from thread #6 on which I wanted to reflect on this the "do not cancel" one. (see copy below... sorry for the repetition - again new thread - need to make sure everybody knows what I'm talking about)

I typically agree with GBAKMARS on the handling of the XPS-700 fiasco story but this particular point makes me a bit different. I guess I'm just not patient enough and I also believe that I'm only ready to give somebody my hard earned money if there is a demonstration of good faith. I understand mistakes and errors - every human can make mistakes - so as organizations. Delayed XPS, missing features, this can all be understandable.
Beyond that is something which is the WAY Dell handles the problems. It cost equally the same to put up an honest post than a "political" one. I might even say telling the truth can be easier as there is no need to "cover the traces". Dell has choosen to mislead us, respond only too late and only in general, can afford to be selective as what questions are being answerred, etc...

I decided to cancel because of this. I got to the point where I had to say no. When an organization is absolutely immune and careless when a customer after 4 weeks of "ping-pong" e-mailing and resolution seeking threatens them with a cancellation and they DO NOT CARE just let me do it ==> it is the end of the road for me. I did not use this "final weapon" early. I did not want to cancel I just wanted to have my problems resolved. There was no help. ZERO. GBAKMARS helped me more than the entire Dell worldwide organization! alone. just by demonstrating that HE CARES what happens around my case!

So I decided to cancel. I want Dell to earn my trust back. I want them to demonstrate somehow that they would like me to go back and join the XPS-700 community.

It's very late so here is the funny side of how this can be done.
What would it take for Lionel to come and sing this song with the "Dell Band" and the choir could be the XPS-700 Development Team. Get your mind around this situation and the words will make sense for the XPS!
You know the song?

Maybe I didnt treat you quite as good as I should
Maybe I didnt love you quite as often as I could
Little things I shouldve said and done, I never took the time
You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind

Maybe I didnt hold you all those lonely, lonely times
And I guess I never told you, Im so happy that youre mine
If I made you feel second best, Im so sorry, I was blind
You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind

(C) (thompson/james/christopher)
(C) Pet Shop Boys

:) :) :) :)

-------GBAKMARS wrote-----------
DON'T CANCEL YET. LET'S GIVE DELL A CHANCE


Also, I would encourage those of you that are talking about cancelling to hang on for a few more days. I am not making any promises, but I do know that there are some discussions going on where the concern of the customer, here on the forum, may be taken seriously. Dell realizes that their customer care has been sub par,and therefore have put hundreds of millions into repair of their customer service.

If you think about it. What % of that hundreds of millions,would it cost Dell, to put into taking care of the beat up XPS 700 customer. They at some point are going to have to show, the watching stockholders, that they mean what they say, when the words, "We value you as a Dell Customer". If they cannot show us, then who in the heck are they going to show.

When a battery blows up and a computer catches fire, that is not a customer service nightmare. That is a PR nightmare cause by a technical problem. But we the XPS 700 customers are the "Direct Hit" damage of poor customer care. Dell didn't inform us. Dell didn't answer our questions. Dell didn't give us sound advice. Dell didn't tell us all we needed to know to make a wise choice. Dell didn't call us on time. Dell extensions didn't work. Dell reps weren't informed. Everything about the XPS 700 SCEAMS:

IMPROVE CUSTOMER CARE AND BEGIN WITH THE CUSTOMER

THE XPS 700 CUSTOMER

I am still pushing Dell loyalty! I am still pushing Dell improvement! I still believe in the Dell product! I think that we need to hang on and not cancel our orders. Dell needs us. They really do. They need us to BECOME satisfied and loyal customers again. My strategy is that we give Dell the best gift they could ever get right about now, with all of the struggles that they are going through. They NEED TO BE ABLE TO PROPERLY COMPENSATE US, AND TO HEAL THE WOUND BEFORE IT BECOMES PERMANENT.

I have asked many of you to send me your story. Your job, your background, your enthusiast desires and dreams, and what you expected from Dell and what you got. And I have found that there are all kinds on our thread. We have a young guy in secondary school, who managed to save $100 towards his XPS 700 and his dad kicked in the rest. We have a superintendent of schools. We have college students, we have lawyers ,teachers, nurses, engineers......And I also have discovered that many are in positions that either directly or indirectly have considerable computer purchasing power. I have already seen some of these more "powerful" types cancel and leave, and their last words were, "I will never by Dell again, and every friend and family member will hear about it. And I will change the way my company buys computers"

Dell needs to treat us well. It is one of the first steps that a company serious about changing it's customer care image MUST take.

So in the end we should stay on, and give Dell the chance to show us that they have finally "LISTENED" and that they "CARE"

DON'T CANCEL YOUR XPS 700 ORDER YET.

GBAKMARS

I wanted to save quoting this long list but since a new thread got started I thought it's a good idea to copy it over so everybody sees what I'm agreeing with! :)

I guess since I can not quote anymore some of the formatting and colors are lost.

Regardless - this is an important subject and I totally agree with everything what is written here.

----------GBAKMARS SAID in THREAD #6----------------
I need some feedback on the following 17 items that I have put together. Check for accuracy and check to see if I have been complete. I will be making several posts today, as I am working on a proposal to be reviewed by Dell the first of the week. It is extremely important that we get this right and allow Dell to see that we have reasons for our concerns, cancellations, speculations, and loss of confidence in Dell Customer Care. Please bare with me on this, and allow me to post a few things that in the past I would have gotten bashed for being repetitive!! If you have your system, are still waiting, or have cancelled, please help me out. The outcome could be significant, and everyone of us could benefit. I feel that we are in a good place at this point and it really is in Dell's best interest and obviously ours, for Dell to Listen to us and take the appropriate steps to heal a very significant wound. We also are at a place where the failure to handle this properly would have a much larger and harder impact then Dell can probably afford, given the current state of affairs. So I encourage everyone to Hang In There! Thanks


1) The 590 is not what Dell claimed. Since there was no qualification in the ad, then Dell has misrepresented the nVidia 590 chipset. Too many features are disabled (800 mem, raid 5 and 10, 2enet, teaming, ip accel, linkboost, etc)
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2) The X-FI sound card is not what Dell claimed. Since there was no qualification in the ad , then Dell has misrepresented the Creative X-FI sound card (which they are now implying that they will give return authorizations and refunds - which may/may not actually happen)
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3) Dell advertised a highly expandable and upgradeable computer. Yet unless the motherboard can be changed to the newer version there are very few upgrade possiblities (due to proprietary power switch, bling leds and add-in audio card front panel mic/headphone)
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4) Dell mislead the customers in their ads by showcasing the new nVidia 7950GX2 cards in the Quad configuration. It is not a choice, and has been removed from the configuration .

5) Dell mislead the customers by selling a product that was not complete and ready to ship. Already long wait times of 1 month turned into 3 months (Dell could've easily avoided this by offering it as a "pre-order" rather than implying it was ready for build/ship/delivery as Purely You).

6) Dell, mislead the customer, buy telling the customer that they were offering an upgrade, when in fact it did not turn out to be an upgrade. Demonstrated by the fact that a brand new customer could order the same processor for the exact same price as the pre July 18 customer. UPGRADE was a misleading term.

7) Dell decieved the customer in that they told the customer that although the legal ship date would be in October, the actualy ship date could be as early as one week and shouldn't be more then 2 (something they couldn't be required to live up to).

8) Dell decieved the customer as they told customers that if they kept the outdated Pentium D processors that their order would ship right away, and much faster then the Core 2 orders. This hasn't happened and Core 2 machines have shipped ahead of Pentium D machines.

9) Dell decieved the customers by indicating that new ship dates would be in the order of the original dates. That has not happened. Identical orders placed in July shipped before the same order placed on June 5. There was no order as promised. One recent example had an order of Aug 14 shipping on Aug 20 jumping ahead of many June/July orders)

10) Dell has not called some customers to date, including the Canadians and Europeans and South Americans (Chile and US.)

11) Free over night shipping that was promised was not always honored.

12) Dell misrepresented the capabilities of the XPS 700 by the specs given on the configuration. Dell said that the 10,000 rpm Raid 0 320GB hard drives were 3Gbs hard drives. Those hard drives do not exist.

13) Dell misled the customer when they allowed the customer to configure systems that included 2 double slot video cards with 3 other pieces of hardware in 3 more PCI slots. The customer that thought he could also add a dual TV tuner, Physics Accelerator, and X-FI sound card, later found out that he would have to change is configuration

14) Dell sent false messages to XPS 700 customers through their on-line and phone customer care representatives. They gave false, and most times meaningless shipping dates which continued to dishonestly pulled the customer along, which subsequently eliminated the customers thoughts of canceling.

15) Dell repeatedly gave inaccurate explanations for the reasons that the XPS 700 was not shipping. The excuses included, shortages of aluminum, Geforce 7950GX2 out of stock, heat/cooling issues not resolved, software compatibility problems, CD/DVD not working properly, Intel hasn't shipped the processors, release dates were outside of Dell's control as other vendors had to give the OK, and on and on.

16) Dell was not fair and consistent with the customers at the time of "The Call". There was a wide range of options made available at the time of the call, when the customer had to chose the $200 gift card / Core 2 modification. Some were told that the 7950 was available and some were not. Some got the Core 2 plus the gift card. Some were allowed to negotiate and some were told, "take it or cancel". Some got dual 7900GTX cards and some a single 7900GTX. The number of options are too many to list here.

17) The information on the web site regarding a person's ship date often didn't change for some customers, while for others they reported constant updates with new ship dates. Often the information of the Order Status page was blantantly inaccurate. Those that used the automated phone system to check dates were often perplexed as a computer could be in the boxing state for up to 10 days, with the ship date being 2 months out!

18) Customers that have received XPS 700 have been reporting many problems with the machine and the list is up to 14 issues that require attention of some kind. A list of those can be seen on this thread , Post # So far one machine was returned due to the number of problems and a replacement is being shipped.

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@hugamuto wrote:

Im not sleeping till I get my computer!

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I'll pre-emptively call your local doctor.

imo, these delays benefits Dell two ways (my evaluative conclusion atm based on the events that have occurred and from personal experience as well as a bit of the people of this forum):

These premises assumes that since overall prices on the XPS today are higher than when we got them, we got them at a pretty good deal (moreso than they would like), especially for those who were able to utilize discounts. This would go along with there public statement that they're declining stock market share worth because they were too aggressive in lowering prices (XPS700's being one of the branches effected) for a competitive edge for their business. Because of this, the group who bought on July 18 or before would hardly result any actual profit; maybe even a loss?

Maybe they lost their confidence of trying to gain some positive street cred to the pc enthusiast/overclocker/gamer market sometime while in the middle of the project. Maybe the takeover of Alienware made them decide it was no longer necessary to pursue this project seriously. This may also be the reason why when it first started, where they were openly asking pc enthusiasts about their dream machine, and how it drastically fell back to Dell's regular tendencies of dumbed-down parts shaving off pennies where ever they thought they could get away with.

1) Anyways, as long as they don't get big press about this, like the exploding laptop batteries, they may believe that it's not worth the time and trouble (ie. waste $$$) in correcting it. We're such a miniscule percentage (something like ~1%) of their business, losing more money than it already took to start the project and sell at such a low cost (obviously not low to the individual consumer, but in a big business sense), why throw away more resources by giving us an actual compensation?

2) (It was initially clear in my head there were two points, but I either forgot one of them or they're kind of melding together) They're solution to regaining some of the lost resources in the XPS700 project is to delay it like they've been doing. imho, the only plausible reason for them to push these systems out the manufacturing door as slow as they are is because they underestimated the amount of potential buyers. In any case, if they can convince enough people to cancel their orders with this passiveness, that'd be less money out of their pockets.

???) What I'm not sure is of how they would expect not only to deal with those who continue to fight for their order and are willing to keep waiting, but delaying it for so long, will turn it into a double-edged sword. It seems like they're taking the risk to let a good chunk of purchasers off their hands, but those who stick with it could lead to a whole lot of trouble. So if this is how they're playing it, they based their actions in underestimating those of us who won't go down quietly.

Not only will customers continue to demand more of them the longer their orders are delayed, but there's a chance it MAY hit certain headlines that the general masses do read (like the explosive laptop batteries that convinced Dell to finally do a recall). Even though the XPS700 was intended to hit a very small market group, the way they handle this situation will reflect what their business is like as a whole. If they try to get away with screwing a small group, what's to say they might try doing it to another branch, one that's a bit more mainstream?

This is why I have a feeling that people cancelling their orders isn't really helping the cause. Some people though just can't hold out any longer and I can understand that, but I think more support can be given for those who can. Even if we all were to cancell our XPS700 orders, if the bases if my premises are basically true, they'd prefer it to not have the potential to reach major headlines. In our interest, the more of us that stick with it and as long as we reasonably can, this potential grows and will make Dell more inclined to help us (becoming in their best interest as well).

Note: I don't have any business degree nor am I currently studying it, so there may be gaps leading to my premises and conclusion.

Message Edited by 13rian on 08-27-200604:49 AM

Message Edited by 13rian on 08-28-200608:10 PM

I was changing my son in the middle of the night and I had an epiphany. I thought I work hard for my money so why am I taking this. If I treated my customers like this I'd be out of business in no time.
I was going to run over to the Apple Store on 5th Ave at 58th St to pick up a MacPro (gotta love that its open 24/7) but they don't have any in stock with the ATI X1900 video card so I went on line and there is a 3-4 week wait with that card. I haven't pulled the trigger yet but I probably will before the day is out. I might give Dell one or two more days to see if they at least give us some info on what's going on but my patience is razor thin at this point.

T3raYon !!  I laughed myself right back to sleep this morning when I read your post and saw Lionel singing your song!!! And I absolutely think your posts late last night were awesome.  You have taken the step to cancel your order and yet you are here still fighting for those that haven't, still standing up and helping Dell out by telling them what they are doing wrong, and why they lost your xps 700 order!! Great job T3raYon!!:smileywink:

Message Edited by gbakmars on 08-27-200607:24 AM

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@pointguard1122 wrote:

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@Deadites wrote:
Believe it or not, but I am now getting some sleep since my broken XPS 700 has arrived.

Unfortunately, now it appears my replacement XPS 700 is one of the ones stuck in the now infamous "In Production" state.

Has anyone else had their systems move over the weekend to KITTING?

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The last one to post that theirs moved into Kitting was on Wednesday.  Either they have more problems and have stopped production, or they have a shortage of case, MB, PS that they are waiting for a new shipment of.  Either way, They haven't been building any more lately.  Oh yeah, this is just "Massive Speculation" since I cannot get anyone to answer my question about it.

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LOL.. speculate away :)

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@Deadites wrote:
Believe it or not, but I am now getting some sleep since my broken XPS 700 has arrived.

Unfortunately, now it appears my replacement XPS 700 is one of the ones stuck in the now infamous "In Production" state.

Has anyone else had their systems move over the weekend to KITTING?

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The last one to post that theirs moved into Kitting was on Wednesday.  Either they have more problems and have stopped production, or they have a shortage of case, MB, PS that they are waiting for a new shipment of.  Either way, They haven't been building any more lately.  Oh yeah, this is just "Massive Speculation" since I cannot get anyone to answer my question about it.

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@nycfarmboy wrote:
I was changing my son in the middle of the night and I had an epiphany. I thought I work hard for my money so why am I taking this. If I treated my customers like this I'd be out of business in no time.
I was going to run over to the Apple Store on 5th Ave at 58th St to pick up a MacPro (gotta love that its open 24/7) but they don't have any in stock with the ATI X1900 video card so I went on line and there is a 3-4 week wait with that card. I haven't pulled the trigger yet but I probably will before the day is out. I might give Dell one or two more days to see if they at least give us some info on what's going on but my patience is razor thin at this point.

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Give em till sometime Wednesday, then change. Can you order the ATI card separate and have them install at the store or intsall it yourself?
Be sure to read anandtech.com's two articles on it (so far) under the mac tab.
They don't have the ATI (yet) card but do have lots of info, pics, insights, and benchmarks.

Message Edited by tphillips63 on 08-27-200609:58 AM

Message Edited by tphillips63 on 08-27-200609:59 AM

Believe it or not, but I am now getting some sleep since my broken XPS 700 has arrived.

Unfortunately, now it appears my replacement XPS 700 is one of the ones stuck in the now infamous "In Production" state.

Has anyone else had their systems move over the weekend to KITTING?