Dell Woes - Blogs

I have just gotten off the phone from Dell Premium Support service and and while the chap finally resolved my issue, I have been left feeling quite perplexed. Here is the full story...

My daughter came to stay with me over the half term break and she brought her Vostro 1510 laptop up as the screen would either not turn on or would got garbled after a period of about 15-30minutes. I phoned Dell technical support and as the laptop was out of warranty, I paid for the extended warranty and Dell agreed to send an engineer out to look at it and potentially replace the motherboard.

An engineer came out this afternoon and replaced the motherboard and all seemed well. However, I soon noticed all was not OK. The bottom row on the keyboard was not behaving as all the keys had shifted one to the right, i.e. press "z" nothing happened, press "x" and "z" appeared, press "c" and "x" appeared. After searching on the web and finding lots of people over the years with the same issue, there seemed to be no resolve, so onto the phone I got and had a fella um'ing and ar'ing before suggesting that I try and upgrade the BIOS and if that failed to rind back. I tried and it didn't work because the BIOS was already up to date.

Frustrated, I phoned tech support yet again and was pass through 4 people, all who wanted my details, all who had to have the issue explained and all "had to put me through to the correct department". The 5th chap was very helpful and organised another engineer to come out to replace the keyboard and motherboard on Monday. I said thank you and asked if I could make a complaint as my daughter would be traveling back down to the Isle of Wight on Sunday and thus, not only had I had to pay for the further 30mins on the phone, but would also have to now pay postage to to send the laptop once the engineer had fixed. I was placed back on hold while the chap spoke to his supervisor. After a few minutes, he came back on the phone and said he had one last thing to try. He connected to my laptop (via DellConnect) and downloaded a file. He the ran the file and selected "UK" and the issue was suddenly resolved.

I chose not to make a formal complaint, as the issue had been resolved and the laptops keyboard was now fully functional and so my daughter would be able to take it back with her. However, I have a few questions:

1. Why did the engineer not know that this could have been an issue?
2. Why could the first person I spoke to not have known the solution?
3. Why did it take me to say I wanted to make a complaint before the last chap I spoke to suddenly have a brain wave and realise the solution?

I have been a loyal customer of Dell for over a decade and have numerous servers as well and desktops and laptops, and I have never been so irritated and frustated at Dell as I have this afternoon.