My experience with dell support

Operating Systems & Open Source
1

Hey all,

Just wanted to share the hell of a time I had trying to get some support on my XPS 13 (the developer edition) running Arch Linux.

I called them up about faulty speakers and headphone jack on the laptop. 

REP: This is dell customer support, how can I be of assistance
ME:  I've got an XPS 13 (9343) with express service code xxxxxxxxxxx 
     that's having an issue with its audio device, Can I get an RMA or a rep out to service it?
REP: First, I'll need to verify a few things. Can you give me your first and last name?

we go through the normal process

All looks good until I hear this gem:

REP: I see here that your particular machine came with Ubuntu Linux installed.  
     Unfortunately we do not provide support here for the Linux operating system at this time.  
     You can call this number for support on your Linux device.

This happens a total of 5 times, each time I get a DIFFERENT phone number. The kicker? Once I got connected to Canonical support. Yes, they sent me to the guys who back Ubuntu.

I finally give up and clonezilla my drive, install windows 10 on temporarially and jump through their hoops. All this to tell me that there's a beta version of their UEFI that I can try if I'd like. I opt for that and they transfer me to another rep.

The rep asks me to verify the service tag and my email address so he can send me the firmware installer. Before he sends it though, he taunts me with:

REP: Sir, just to verify, are you on Windows or Linux?  I see here your device came preinstalled with Linux.

I lose it. In hindsight, I feel bad for the rep, but this is hour 5 of trying to fix the audio device on my laptop.

He verifies for me that they do, in fact, support Linux. At this point, I'm totally done with dell. Next time I'm going to buy from a manufacturer that just can trust that users know their shit.

Now I'm reinstalling Arch from scratch because apparently clonezilla somehow corrupt my btrfs partition. After some quick attempts to salvage the partition, I'm racing to get the system reinstalled before I have to go to class tomorrow.

TL;DR: I hate dell and I want to rant while I'm reinstalling Linux on my laptop.

1 Like
2

You'd have better luck funding a water pump for a delorean in the sahara desert than support for a dell laptop running linux.

Should've just asked here. Here we'll tell you you're screwed right away. as opposed to dell which will take 5 hours to tell you you're screwed. lol

4 Likes
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Did you ask here?

You should also tweet them or something, i hear that works sometimes when they are publicly shamed.

4

You'd have better luck funding a water pump for a delorean in the sahara desert than support for a dell laptop running linux.

Yeah, kinda disappointed that I decided to get the laptop. I was under the impression I'd be able to get support for Linux because it shipped with Ubuntu.

Should've just asked here. Here we'll tell you you're screwed right away. as opposed to dell which will take 5 hours to tell you you're screwed. lol

I wound up getting it sorted. The frustrating thing was that after all this, the solution was available through Linux. I'm still trying to get the damn system just so. Thankfully my /home was backed up via

Did you ask here?

Didn't ask here, figured it was better to talk with the people who made the hardware. The good thing is that the hardware issue is solved.

You should also tweet them or something, i hear that works sometimes when they are publicly shamed.

Thing is, I don't have a twitter. I might go make one though.

This whole post was more of just me letting off steam from an extremely frustrating day. What's worse is once I posted this, I went to make a USB for Solus on one of my windows boxes. Keyboard was acting up, so I tried unplugging and plugging it back in. I got a shock from the USB port (or I shocked it, not 100% sure, humidity is hovering around 4% in San Diego right now) and the power supply popped a capacitor and the whole system went dark.

The Damage: Z170-A board dead, not sure about i5-6600k inside it. Hard drives (1x1TB, 1x3TB) good. GPU (970) unknown state. PSU (Corsair RM750) dead.

I don't think it was faulty hardware, more of bad thinking on my part. I shouldn't have been touching the computer with the humidity like it is.

5

Yeah dell support is terrible. not as bad as lenovo though. was told they could not fix a broken screen because i installed linux.

I do like dell for there hardware though. They have great pc's that use off the shelf components that are easy to fix or replace.

6

Oh don't get me wrong, I love the laptop. I just have a problem with the support.

7

All tech support sucks nowadays... I think this is the best one I have seen

But seriously, ask here or use IRC (the best tech support in the fucking world). Actually just ask on IRC for whatever linux distro or on the dell channel, if there still is one. Driver devs as well as hardware hackers are on there. :P

It also super pays to rip shit apart ani learn the peices yourself. I can fix any P4 I find and make it run. Solid.

1 Like
8

Shoulda bought a used Thinkpad man, unless you want battery life or performance or something

1 Like
9

Shoulda bought a used Thinkpad man, unless you want battery life or performance or something

I looked at the old thinkpads when I was in the market. They're great if you just want a portable computer that runs Linux well, but they didn't fit my requirements, which were:

  • lightweight
  • 1080p (not firm requirement, but nice to have)
  • 5+ hours of battery life
  • 8GB ram

Yeah, that's about it. I'm not too picky either way, and my company has a partnership with dell, 15% off, so I wound up with what amounted to a $1200 bill being something around $1025 out the door. Expensive for some, but I wanted this thing to last. So far, the battery has gone through a lot of discharge cycles and is at 94% capacity, I've upgraded the SSD from 128GiB to 512GiB and it does everything I need it to. (Now that I solved the audio issue)

But seriously, ask here or use IRC (the best tech support in the fucking world). Actually just ask on IRC for whatever linux distro or on the dell channel, if there still is one. Driver devs as well as hardware hackers are on there. :P

From now on I'm definitely working with forums and IRC instead of their support, but I'll tell ya, It just makes me wonder how they don't get sued all the time.