Unbelievably bad advice from Dell!

[gordonmarkus]

Hi everyone,

I've got to get this rant of my chest, because I cannot believe that it's actually happened. It will just add more momentum to the wave of unhappiness against MS and the big manufacturers as it it were needed - but here it comes...

So my Sister and my brother in law wanted to get a new pc, just for a bit of web browsing, e-mail - on line shopping and a few games as well. They have a 4 year old daughter, and wanted to stick some educational games on the machine as well.

I advised to avoid buying for one of the high street stores like PC World as the staff are generally incompetant and I've witnessed them giving inaccurate or blatently wrong advice on a number of occasions. So anyway, as my sister has Dell machines at work - they called Dell and bought a new PC for £600. Their specs to dell were an internet suitable machine that could run a few games and do e-mail etc. Also something that wouldn't need upgrading for a few years.

My brother in law bought a few games, and found that hardly any of them would run, due to the crappy on board graphics card. So he went out and bought a new AGP 3d card, only to get back home and find that there are no AGP or PCI-x slots in the machine! There is only 2 regular PCI slots. I didn't even think that companies made motherboards without AGP or PCI-x. Anyway - they decided to keep the machine, and I said that I'd source a PCI 3D card for them.

So last week I was down at their place (130 miles away) and I setup their PC with anti-virus, firewall, anti spyware and all the other bits that are needed on an XP box, and setup their wireless network and generally got the machine running sweet. I also had to remove all the s**t that came on the PC - like AOL, and various other dell sponsored crap. Within a couple of days, the machine became infected with spyware and was creating pop ups and changing the homepage of the browser etc. I tried talking my brother in law through getting shot of the diseases but he couldn't really do it - so I said that I'd deal with it when I was down at Christmas.

My Brother in law called Dell's helpline for assistance in the meantime, and the numpty on the phone told him to re-install windows!! I don't actually believe this happened, as I'm now going to have to spend another 4 or 5 hours over christmas rebuilding this pc that is only a month old!

I find it unbelievable that a large manufacture can dispense this awful advice to novice users.

I certainly won't recommend anyone call Dell for tech support on their new machine ever again. Also the fact that they sell under specified machines for an over inflated price is prettly alarming.

-Gordon.

[Patrick]

My Brother in law called Dell's helpline for assistance in the meantime, and the numpty on the phone told him to re-install windows!! I don't actually believe this happened, as I'm now going to have to spend another 4 or 5 hours over christmas rebuilding this pc that is only a month old!

I find it unbelievable that a large manufacture can dispense this awful advice to novice users.

I believe it. I know someone at work who was on the phone with Dell tech support in India for 6 hours getting their machine up and running again. I still have people (family included) coming up to me asking to help them with their windows box. I tell them no. Not even if they pay me. If they want help installing/tweaking Linux I will do it for free. You have to draw a line at some point. Maybe if they spend a lot a money and get infected again they will realize it's simply not worth running windows any longer. Some people are really thick and simply won't get it.

[mowestusa]

My Brother in law called Dell's helpline for assistance in the meantime, and the numpty on the phone told him to re-install windows!! I don't actually believe this happened, as I'm now going to have to spend another 4 or 5 hours over christmas rebuilding this pc that is only a month old!

I find it unbelievable that a large manufacture can dispense this awful advice to novice users.

Actually, this is common level one support answer. In fact if the computer is slowing down and infected by a lot of spyware, I would guess that most computer repair places would do exactly the same thing and charge you for a $60-$100 repair bill. Even an IT guy who works with Windows regularly, said that it is not uncommon for them to recommend reinstalling of Windows on their company machines every 2 years just to deal with broken libraries and other issues.

I guess I'm suprised that this advice surprised you. Certainly it is not the first thing you or I would do, but this is increadibly common today, even more so in the old Win95 and Win98 days. Why do you think that so many WinXP boxes come with the "Restore Partition" now on the harddrive, so that you can issue a simple command and have Windows reinstalled in no time.

The hardware issue has been something Dell has done for some time. I have a Celeron 500 with the old Intel 810 chipset and no AGP slot (PCIx wasn't around of course back then.) Dell has placed specialized hardware built to their specs in their machines for a while. I had a terrible time getting a new motherboard to fit into an old Dell case because the case opening for the I/O ports was not standard. I finally got the motherboard to sit in the case, but the I/O opening is not perfect. On my Celeron 500 Dell is uses an AT motherboard which needs a special plug not found on modern powersupplies. The powersupply is unique too, it is only 80watts, I have never seen one that small even for that old of computer. In fact I had a loud fan in that 80watt powersupply, and because it was so unique and had the special AT plug, I decided to not even try to replace the powersupply being concerned that a new standard powersupply would not be compatable with the motherboard, so I opened up the powersupply and wired in a new 80mm Case Fan. So far it still seems to work, but I have not left that computer on for long periods of time.

I will say, I have had very little trouble with hardware failures with stuff from Dell, even though they use some unique stuff. It has also been forgiving as to the type of RAM, of the shelf RAM usually worked just fine.

Anyway, thought I would add my 2 cents.

[dann]

From a business perspective it's probably a hell of a lot more economical for level 1 support to recommend the user re-install the OS. I mean face it, people want a solution that is going to fix their computer and a re-install is going to do that; albeit temporarily. Plus, the steps for doing this are quite simple so the support specialist can simple provide, what, a 4 step list or direct the user to their manual. Contrast that with having to talk someone through acquiring, installing and running various spyware and anti-virus tools over and over again and jumping between normal and safe mode. It's just not economically viable.

You take such a system to a shop and they will charge you through the nose for such a service as opposed to the inflated, but cheaper, re-install of the OS.

We hear time and again that Linux is far to hard for Joe-user to install and configure. Well, that holds true for Joe-user fixing his own spyware riddled Windows box. It ain't gonna happen unless Joe-user takes the time to learn how to use these tools; a task much more difficult than learning how to install and configure Linux, imhop.

As for Dell hardware; I don't think they are unique in this. We had acers and I've seen Compaq's and HP's with the same problems. Particularly on low profile system, you get half-height pci cards and integrated agp with no seperate slot. I suspect the same holds true for their more economical models. Most Dell systems make it difficult to add a second hard drive.

[mowestusa]

As for Dell hardware; I don't think they are unique in this. We had acers and I've seen Compaq's and HP's with the same problems. Particularly on low profile system, you get half-height pci cards and integrated agp with no seperate slot. I suspect the same holds true for their more economical models. Most Dell systems make it difficult to add a second hard drive.

All of your points were good, Dann, and I agree with these hardware comments. I forgot to mention to limitation of only one hard drive on Dell systems, I believe this is very true with their low end systems, I know my Celeron 500 only lets you mount a hard drive in one spot. I will also say that my biggest problem with my old Dell and Linux is that onboard intel 810 graphics. For some reason the framebuffer terminal that most distros use for the boot up process does not like that chipset. Additionally, DSL and other low memory distros use an xserver that does not support that chipset either. Xorg supports it though.

[chuck]

And your current situation is why I don't like to help people with Windows systems outside of family.

And even now when I do help family set up a new machine I spend the couple hours getting everything installed at MY home on MY schedule. I install an Ubuntu partition so that I can tell them to select that if/when they cannot boot into Windows until I can get there to fix it.

After getting it all set up the way I want I grab an image of the completed system for when the inevitable restore has to happen. That way it's just run a few updates after the restore and it's happy.

And I generally get a few free meals out of it so it's all good.

[jsusanka]

My Brother in law called Dell's helpline for assistance in the meantime, and the numpty on the phone told him to re-install windows!! I don't actually believe this happened, as I'm now going to have to spend another 4 or 5 hours over christmas rebuilding this pc that is only a month old!

I find it unbelievable that a large manufacture can dispense this awful advice to novice users.

I believe it. I know someone at work who was on the phone with Dell tech support in India for 6 hours getting their machine up and running again. I still have people (family included) coming up to me asking to help them with their windows box. I tell them no. Not even if they pay me. If they want help installing/tweaking Linux I will do it for free. You have to draw a line at some point. Maybe if they spend a lot a money and get infected again they will realize it's simply not worth running windows any longer. Some people are really thick and simply won't get it.

me too pat - that is exactly what I say - I don't have enough time in my life to be screwing with windows period.

when they ask about apps - I tell them don't buy the crap at grocery store for 10 bucks. use open source and higher quality software written by people who love to do it and aren't just in it to take your money.

I converted two people like this but had more turn away - which is fine - let them keep forking their money over to steve, bill and company. my money isn't going to redmond.

[TankCatNinjaFish]

I basically do the same thing as Pat, though instead of refusing to fix Windows machines I just play dumb and pretend I have no idea "how to fix PC's". I learned my lesson at my previous job when I somehow become an unpaid secondary Windows sysadmin b/c the existing admins and IT staff were stretched too thin. If I can I'll show them my Ubuntu laptop and tell them they can have it legally and free.

[snarkout]

I have the distinct pleasure of a) having very few (or no) relatives who run windows, and b) having no idea how to fix problems on windows boxes so I can't get roped into that kind of shit anyhow.

As for Dell, are you certain they had them *reinstall* rather than do a system restore?

[gordonmarkus]

Hi there,

some interesting points there. I can definitely confirm that the dell helpdesk monkey got them to do a re-install, as he got my brother in law to boot from the cd, thus destroying all the decent work that I had done.

oh well....

-Gordon.

[dlz]

Actually, this is common level one support answer. In fact if the computer is slowing down and infected by a lot of spyware, I would guess that most computer repair places would do exactly the same thing and charge you for a $60-$100 repair bill. Even an IT guy who works with Windows regularly, said that it is not uncommon for them to recommend reinstalling of Windows on their company machines every 2 years just to deal with broken libraries and other issues.

I own a PC repair shop, and we do mostly Windows repairs (and a tiny bit of out of warranty Mac and some Linux work.) We always try to save a machine before actually doing a wipe and reset. And even in the case of doing a reset we create a full backup for the customer. Too often I see shops (big and small, I'm looking at the BB) just wipe a machine without a backup.

I've also seen Dell dish out the reinstall device for people, but in a few cases they never walked the person past doing the initial install. Just installed Windows and that was in. The machines ended up in our shop with nothing working, because they never actually told the person about installing drivers. They also lacked to tell the person that formatting their hard drive would erase all the data on it.

I know it warns you it'll erase everything before you format, and that we consider it common knowledge. But a lot of people unfortunately blindly follow the tech support and never even read the prompts. There have been times when I could recover the data for them (I hate seeing the looks on their faces when they tell me they never backed up 4 years worth of baby photos.) But other times it's a lost cause, because the kids or whatever have gotten on again and already filled the drive with music and games (and we don't have the facilities to perform that kind of recovery.)

[dann]

I own a PC repair shop, and we do mostly Windows repairs (and a tiny bit of out of warranty Mac and some Linux work.) We always try to save a machine before actually doing a wipe and reset. And even in the case of doing a reset we create a full backup for the customer. Too often I see shops (big and small, I'm looking at the BB) just wipe a machine without a backup.

Question for you dlz about this. I know when I used to work on systems for people and had to try and clean up the muck I noticed it could take an awful long time. As we know, time is money and most freelancers charge a by the hour fee. I suspect you charge a bench fee along with possibly and hourly fee too?

Anyway, I found it difficult to justify trying to clean a person's machine properly and do all the testing in an amount of time that was economically feasible for the user. It would get to the point where I would say, if I keep working on this the person could buy a whole new computer for the cost of fix this one.

Where do you draw the line?

[DaveQB]

And your current situation is why I don't like to help people with Windows systems outside of family.

And even now when I do help family set up a new machine I spend the couple hours getting everything installed at MY home on MY schedule. I install an Ubuntu partition so that I can tell them to select that if/when they cannot boot into Windows until I can get there to fix it.

After getting it all set up the way I want I grab an image of the completed system for when the inevitable restore has to happen. That way it's just run a few updates after the restore and it's happy.

And I generally get a few free meals out of it so it's all good.

Whats your imaging method ?