Dell woes
So I’ve finally got my Dell D630 three months after I ordered it. Everything was shiny, even Ubuntu 7.10 worked out of the box except the sound card (as long as you use the safe video mode for the initial install).
But I noticed a small scratch directly on the display panel last Sunday. Not nice. As I’ve enrolled almost every support update that is possible with Dell I contacted their support line, a technician came two days later and installed a new panel. I was quite happy for the quick support.
Two hours later I recognized that my former glossy display had turned into a reflective one. While this is advantageous as I do not own a mirror in my flat I decided to contact Dell’s service again as it is just impossible to work longer while staring into a kinda mirror. Also some pixel errors appeared (around half a dozen always white or black pixel).
After half an hour in the waiting queue the helpful support tech told me that the display will be replaced with a glossy one and the local technician will contact me on Monday. This time I also reported my defective Dell D610 display where the lower left side of the panel seems to be folding backwards (which should be physical impossible). The support guy asked me to send in some pictures to better understand the problem, I did it and just received a mail notification that the panel will be replaced.
So lots of bonus points for Dell’s intent of changing every defective part, some negative points for their execution. There are still worlds between Dell’s support division and that hellhole named Apple Support.
The new laptop included a nice nVidia NVS 135 discrete graphics card so I finally took the time to try Cedega/wine (Cedega is the commerical version of wine that should provide better (3D) support). Through that emulator I should be able to play most (older) Windows-based games under Linux. The only two important games that came to my mind were Starcraft and Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword. The former already worked with my old laptop and the later one produces obscure error messages. While wine just tells me about some “shader error” (for which I tried the various hints from the web, but none of them worked), cedega does the right thing ™ of just segfaulting the background process and giving the user no feedback about the execution status whatsoever. What was even more curious is that the installation through wine seemed a lot faster than the cedega one.
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In my career at IT support I had hundreds of support calls with dell, though you reach a different Hotline as business customer there never occured any problems, well sometimes it takes a bit longer to get someone on the line but most of the time its under 5 minutes.
I’ve got experiences as private customer as well, no bad experiences as well. A friend of mine experienced a high pitch sound out of her new xps, she called support, they changed something in the bios and he called her back after the weekend if the problem persists.
I as well had to change my keyboard twice, because the first one was clappering a bit, then I got a new one which was much better but after a few months a key broke, no problem as well a technician changed the keyboard (I didn’t want to do it simply because I payed for a technician ;) )
I thought about buying a macbook or a d620 and decided to choose dell because I simply knew their support and notebook quality.