The more patient you are with their procedures the more you'll be "rewarded" later for your troubles. I was very patient (most think I was too patient) and went on for 39 days without a respectable replacement. On day 40 they said they had a system on the way (granted they overnighted it to my old address I no longer live at 4 hours away and across the state of Florida but hey... what's one more screw up).
On day 42 (after having Dell pay to redirect the package overnight to the correct address from day 41) I had a 4400$ XPS m1710 that replaced my E1705 I had originally purchased for 1100$ including tax/shipping.
Granted I had also bought 13 systems within a 7 month period thru my Home/EPP/Small Business accounts may have had some weight when I finally fired off letters to the department heads of numerous Customer Care branches as well as Dell Corporate Complaints, and the manager of the system exchange team in India.
Unfortunately we have systems here on NBF that are considered top 5% in performance of the systems that Dell sells. These replacements they send are basically redirects from the Dell Outlet. A system must be ready for posting on the Dell Outlet during a weekday during normal business hours in order for them to flag it. So you'll see systems that are "equal or better" to yours in the Outlet late night or on weekends that they won't be able to intercept before someone else buys them. This means after the 10-15 days expires they scramble to send you the first one available as a "stop gap" measure hoping you may just accept it.
In most cases where someone had an older generation system die, the newer generation systems will have sufficient hardware to meet the criteria of acceptable replacement. But when your E1705 dies, and it's the current generation... they are stuck until they get lucky enough to find something as good as yours. If you don't start getting aggressive too soon then when you finally do their policy does allow for showing additional "thanks" for being patient with them during that time even though it did greatly inconvenience you.
Let them do their thing and eventuall you'll be in that queue longer than anyone else at the time and then you throw the red flag in and yell penalty. That is when you will see them say "please give us just 1 more day and if we don't have a system we will escalate you further". When that happens, be prepared to receive a very acceptable replacement that you didn't expect to get.
On day 42 (after having Dell pay to redirect the package overnight to the correct address from day 41) I had a 4400$ XPS m1710 that replaced my E1705 I had originally purchased for 1100$ including tax/shipping.
Granted I had also bought 13 systems within a 7 month period thru my Home/EPP/Small Business accounts may have had some weight when I finally fired off letters to the department heads of numerous Customer Care branches as well as Dell Corporate Complaints, and the manager of the system exchange team in India.
Unfortunately we have systems here on NBF that are considered top 5% in performance of the systems that Dell sells. These replacements they send are basically redirects from the Dell Outlet. A system must be ready for posting on the Dell Outlet during a weekday during normal business hours in order for them to flag it. So you'll see systems that are "equal or better" to yours in the Outlet late night or on weekends that they won't be able to intercept before someone else buys them. This means after the 10-15 days expires they scramble to send you the first one available as a "stop gap" measure hoping you may just accept it.
In most cases where someone had an older generation system die, the newer generation systems will have sufficient hardware to meet the criteria of acceptable replacement. But when your E1705 dies, and it's the current generation... they are stuck until they get lucky enough to find something as good as yours. If you don't start getting aggressive too soon then when you finally do their policy does allow for showing additional "thanks" for being patient with them during that time even though it did greatly inconvenience you.
Let them do their thing and eventuall you'll be in that queue longer than anyone else at the time and then you throw the red flag in and yell penalty. That is when you will see them say "please give us just 1 more day and if we don't have a system we will escalate you further". When that happens, be prepared to receive a very acceptable replacement that you didn't expect to get.
