Dell Found Guilty of Fraud, False Advertising

Last year, the Attorney General of New York instigated a lawsuit against Dell for practices like long hold times, repeated call transfers, and disconnects for customers waiting for phone support — all of which make it harder to cash in on promises of (and paid-for) technical support." Now, raptor78 writes "IDG News reports on New York Attorney General's victory over the poor services and deceptive practices employed by Dell over the past years with regards to technical support and promotional offers. It is about time someone spoke up and realized some of the horrors people deal with at Dell." Another reader points to a quick report from Fortune magazine on the ruling.

Comments

Not my experience

[TomRK1089]

Personally I've not experienced these practices the article speaks of. My video card died on my Latitude D630 about a month ago, and it took me all of 30 minutes to speak with a technical support staffer on the Dell website and schedule someone to come out the next day. Maybe this is a case of "you get what you pay for," since I've got the next-day service contract -- maybe people with lesser maintenance contracts and whatnot get the runaround. Just my perspective.

Re:Not my experience

[Pingh]

I can't say I've had any bad experience with Dell for support. Amoung the items I purchased was a 32" TV. When it arrived and I plugged it in, it went into a constant cycle of reboots which made it impossible to do anything with. A quick call and they had a replacement in 2 days, and free shipping on returning the defective item.

Another thing I like about Dell support is that if you're in an IT firm, you can qualify yourself as Dell certified. That way when you call in you can basically say 'Hey the hd is dead on this laptop' and provide a warantee number and they'll take your word for it. They won't ask you the 300 questions that it would take for them to determine the hd is actually dead.

But this may be the service -now-. I know they moved several call centers back to North America, and I can't say I've had any experience with that prior to 2 years ago.

/me shrugs

Re:It's just business?

[Samalie]

In my opinion, not only does Dell "meet" industry standards, but generally they go above and beyond. At least, that has been my experience.

I'm a sysadmin, and have worked with Dell and their systems for the last 10 years.

I find they generally have a lower failure rate than other manufacturers I have used in the past, and their tech support has been second to none. I call them up, I get someone in North America, I explain what the problem is and how I've reached my diagnostic conclusion, and I have the part and/or a service technician in my home or office the next business day. Every time.

The best I had was on the Optiplex 5xx line a couple of years ago...we discovered a failure in their motherboard design which would cause CPU fan faults, and eventually fry the CPU. The only symptom before it all went to shit was the CPU fan running signifigantly louder than usual. We had 25 units with the "defective" motherboard...and once the problem was diagnosed & repaired on the first failed unit, Dell sent a small army of techs (well, they sent 10) to replace the motherboards in the 24 other PC's, regardless of the fact that not one of them was showing symptoms of the flaw.

And for the record, I'll get the tech to do a full MB/CPU swap, but other than that I'd rather just have the part & replace it myself...but if I want a tech to swap a failed stick of RAM or HDD they'd send the tech...I just find its a waste of effort on their part to send someone to do a job I can do in 30 seconds myself.

Re:It's just business?

[AKAImBatman]

I find they generally have a lower failure rate than other manufacturers I have used in the past, and their tech support has been second to none.

To offer a counter-point, my last place of work saw regular failures with our Dell server equipment. My personal favorite was when the SQL Server database went offline and no one could figure out why. At first it appeared to be a disk failure. But if that was the case, why didn't the RAID array continue working with the other drives? Turns out, the RAID controller failed. Corrupted all the data on the disks, too. We had to pull the previous day's backup and apologize to customers that the day's data had been lost. (Thankfully it happened on a Saturday.)

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

After that period Dell decided to threaten me for not letting them have the laptop back by charging my card used for the original purchase 2 years prior for the new laptop

Call you CC company. Do a chargeback.

Re:It's just business?

[Volante3192]

I'm willing to bet that average end users get a much different experience then corporate customers, but I can provide my experience as a corporate customer.

Based on personal experience, you'd win that bet.

Laptop my boss purchased for personal use, Latitude (well, consumer line...I don't recall if that's the Latitude or not). Busted keyboard. Literally ended up taking MONTHS to get it replaced.

Stupid techs never listened to the diagnostics, best part was it got shipped to a repair depot, they turn it on, "Computer turns on fine. User needs to type password in." was the return. NEVER actually typed anything otherwise they'd see the keys jam and repeat.

Fortunatly, since the initial issue was placed before the warranty expired, all work was done under warranty (even though it was finally fixed 4 months AFTER the expiration date.)

However, on our Optiplexes and Inspirons, service is all but flawless. PowerEdge support is like five nines of satisfaction, and the PowerVault tape loaders? Best. Support. EVER. They'll literally bend over backwards to support those devices.

I cannot, for the life of me, recall one single instance where I have been completely disappointed by Dell support on our business class products, and we've had to call in about 40 LCDs, 40 HDs, 30 PSUs, and single digit quantities of mobos, cd-rom drives, RAM, and LTO tapes.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[Tufriast]

I use to a work for a company that did outsourcing for Dell named Stream. Flat out - I will admit we turned away as many people as possible. We offered hardware support for 30 days, and some software support, and if the support window was closed (30 days) it was $30 per incident. That support window handled most software issues, and most hardware issues. I felt kind of scummy doing it, so when I was laid off, I was happy. I'm pretty sure it the outsourcing went to some place overseas. I recall once billing for some software support to the tune of $120.00. The software itself was installed improperly - which was the cause of the problem. (Don't mix Office and MS Works.) This was circa 2001, and after that experience I learned - NEVER get a Dell.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[morgan_greywolf]

I'm pretty sure it the outsourcing went to some place overseas. I recall once billing for some software support to the tune of $120.00

No. My step-son used to work there as well (laid off within the last 6 months or so), so I can say with confidence that Stream still does support outsourcing for Dell, and they still pull shit like this.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[Hognoxious]

in america corporations can't be incarcerated, nor can their officers.

O RLY?

And while this guy didn't go to the slammer, some say his way of avoiding it was rather extreme.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[Teilo]

By that view, if you want to commit murder, creating a faulty product that kills people is certainly the best way to get away with it. Yes, except for one not-so-minor requirement of law called mens rea . In other words, to use your example, in order to charge someone with murder, they actually had to have the intent to commit murder.

If you believe that Ford motor company has the intent to commit murder, you are welcome to your opinion, however illogical it may be.

And I thought I was a conspiracy theorist.

Re:tip of the iceberg

[cmdr_klarg]

What? No mention of selling new fancy dual core computers bundled with XP home, which doesn't support multiple cores, effectively wasting half of the expensive computer that the customer bought? XP Home will support multiple cores just fine, but not multiple CPUs (i.e. it will support a dual core CPU, but not 2 single cores CPUs).

Re:It's just business?

[Ephemeriis]

We're an "authorized Dell reseller" if that matters to you.

We, obviously, recommend Dell to pretty much all our clients. The failure rate for individual machines and components is about what I'd expect from any manufacturer.

Their technical support is generally OK for the business-grade stuff (like your GOLD support) and crap for home customers. But I won't rave about it. I've been on the phone with absolute morons entirely too many times.

I've had printer techs who couldn't take a printer apart. I've had server technicians who couldn't handle basic terminology. I had hours and hours of sitting on the phone with optiplex capacitor problems trying to convince them to just fricking replace the motherboard like they claimed they were doing on their website. This is fricking GOLD corporate support here! I'm glad they got nailed, they richly deserved it. The problem is that Dell's on-site tech support is all outsourced to someone more local. We were, for a while, an authorized service center as well as reseller. We'd get the calls to go swap out somebody's motherboard or whatever. And I'll tell you right now that their testing/training does not qualify someone to actually work on their products. You really need the hands-on experience, which you don't get with their testing/training process.

We'd get sent out on calls to work on their printers because were were authorized and someone had taken the test... But we weren't given any special technical documentation. So we had no better idea where the parts were located inside any given printer than the end-user did.

Eventually it got too frustrating and we stopped doing the service calls.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[quanticle]

Martha Stewart was not incarcerated for anything that her corporation did. She was incarcerated for lying under oath regarding a completely different company - ImClone. In the ImClone case she wasn't an officer of the company, but a mere shareholder who traded illegally based on insider information.

Re:It's just business?

[Bobb Sledd]

OH, let me tell you.

I work for the government. Apparently much of our equipment has contracts for support.

This particular item did not.

So I had a network printer where the network card failed. I also found out that it was a NIC that was on a faulty replacement list.

So, I called HP support and explained to the person my problem. "OK, we will need $59 by credit card to speak with technical support." He says.

"But the card is on the faulty NIC card list, I shouldn't need to give you anything."

Still refused. I asked to speak to a manager. Frustrated, I think he hung up on me.

So I called back. I explained the problem *again* from the beginning, what I had done to troubleshoot, and explained that the card was on a faulty recall list.

Still they refused without collecting a $59 fee. I explained that I did not need to give them a credit card because the NIC was on a faulty recall list. Still she refused. I hung up this time.

I called back a 3rd time! This time, I explained to the gatekeeper everything from the beginning. He seemed surprised that the first two people didn't know this card was on a recall list and sent me right over to the JetDirect tech support (without paying a $59 fee).

I spoke to the JetDirect support tech, calmly explained everything I had done to troubleshoot, and he immediately agreed that the NIC was faulty, and that it appeared to be on the recall list. He then put me on hold.

He came back and said, "well it does appear this model is on the list, but the serial number you gave me is apparently not in the range of serial numbers in the recall. So, unless you can show us a receipt showing that the card has been replaced in the last 2 years, we will need $499 for a new card."

I nearly choked. I thanked him for his support and that I would look around for a receipt of the swap (highly unlikely around this office).

I finally found a replacement for $78 shipped, got my office to acquire and pay for it, received it, put it in, and got the printer to work again.

But I dare say HP helped me even one little bit.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[Z34107]

Firstly, the Indian government owned 49%. This wasn't "greedy and stupid", this was just "stupid" and yet another reason why centralized economic planning is bad.

Besides the fact that an industrial disaster, however negliegent and stupid, isn't exactly murdering hitmen, there's a problem with your wikipedia entry:

The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia.
Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions.(April 2008)

This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality.
Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page. (May 2008)

This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2008)

Now, I can't speak for INDIA, but in America, those who put "yourself and your possessions ahead of everything else in the whole world" would have gone to jail and the corporation fined.

That is, IF it wasn't stopped by the appropriate federal agency when the groundwater became toxic and livestock started dying. If it wasn't stopped by a civil suit FAILING action by said government agency.

Re:Finally

[^_^x]

Oh snap...
Yeah, I've returned monitors in the past by just giving them any old tag, but last time they had to be really specific and asked for a desktop's tag if I didn't know the original system it should have gone with.

Also, just once I had a new tablet from them that they had no record of the tag for. I basically had to find a copy of the invoice from our purchaser and give them the Dell order number that contained it. This was after the poor phone tech had looked up our company record and scrolled back through it ("It says you guys ordered $40k worth of stuff last month. We should just be able to take your word for it!" of course I know what it's like working a helpdesk and not having clearance to do a quick easy fix for someone...) That took two 1.5 hour calls to run through!

But still, from the 90s on, they are still my favorite premade system company since they're (historically) of good build quality and always very easy to disassemble. Also two things that sold me my laptop several years ago was that they were the only game in town for a laptop with an (upgradeable-ish) nVidia 3D card and a hot swappable secondary battery. Build quality and support quality are getting shaky lately; still, before this at work we were using HP-Compaqs! God, I replaced 1-3 worn out power supplies a week for about a year there... now the DVD-ROM/CDRWs are wearing out and gluing discs inside them, leaving gum on the disc hub! Now THOSE are bad PCs!

CORPORATE MANSLAUGHTER!!!!!

[Pax681]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_manslaughter

http://www.hse.gov.uk/corpmanslaughter/faqs.htm

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2008/03/15/41798/corporate-manslaughter-legal-q.html
i am pretty sure this law was brought in due to a few things where the coprorate body was deemed to be liable for deaths caused but there seemed to be inadequate laws to punish the heads of the coprorate bodies

it's not just businesses but also the national health bodies here in the UK and also local/regional councils too.

from what i gather the charges being brought are rare and even rarer is a successful charge.