Giving up on Dell after a 15 year run

Just to let you all know, I have worked in IT for a living for the last 15 years. I have been a big fan of Dell most of that time. I have pushed IT departments at a 3,000 student and a 15,000 student university into becoming Dell exclusive cutomers.

On the PC and Notebook fronts, this was helped along by the implosion of Gateway's customer support in the late 90's and early 00's. On the server fronts Dell simply had better prices than Sun, IBM, and HP.

My team currently runs Precision M90's, M6300's, and Latitiude 830s for notebooks. We run Optiplex and Precision Workstations. We run 2950 servers.

My experience with tech support on my personal 1705 opened my eyes to how wide the gulf is between higher ed support and consumers with Gold Complete Care.

The last 2 times my 7900GS in my 1705 failed I was able to get a new one in a couple of days. Now they are out and can only offer me an X1440. I was told that in the future I can get another 7900, but I have been lied to by overseas tech support 4 times now and simply can not trust them.

Now I have 2 options. 1) have my 1705 replaced with a refurbished 1720 or 2) send in my 1705 to have the video card replaced.

The 1720 gives me no DVI out and a slower video card. There is no way I am going to run my Dell 2407 24" monitor at 1920x1200 over a VGA cable. The lack of DVI also means that I can no longer hook up to my 42" lcd tv through the HDMI input. If Dell had chosen to put DDR3 in the 8600M GT instead of DDR2 it would be a push on speed with the 7900, but instead the 8600 will be much slower.

Sending in the 1705 means that my next day on site service is out the window. Another 7900gs means that I may be dealing with this again in 9-16 months if the new card decides to cook itself as well.

The only 2 notebooks with 17" displays that still have DVI outputs are the M6300 and XPS1730. Dell flatout refused to offer these as a replacement option. I told them that I would be willing to pay the difference between what I paid for the 1705 and an M6300 or 1730 and they refused. I asked if I could just send this flawed machine back and they refused.

So now I give up. I plan to just take the 1720 and not even open it. I will just sell it locally with the last 2 years of gold support complete care. I will lose at $500 on the deal. I will then either buy a Gateway or an Apple Macbook Pro and put this behind me.

Even though the support at work is night and day better I also plan to look at other options besides Dell. Sun is back with a vengeance on the server and mass storage front. Macbook Pros run Windows just as well as a Dell but cost more.

The losing $500 comment is based on what I use the computer for. I am a photographer on the weekends and take the 1705 with me to jobs to dump CF cards to. Its also nice when you are shooting a wedding to be able to show them pictures in between the day's events. When I get back to the house, I run my 2407 with a Color Spyder Elite 3 calibration system through the DVI out on the 1705 (1920x1200 on vga = no). When I show the finished pictures to my clients I hook up to an LG 1080p 42" LCD through a DVI - HDMI adaptor. Not having the DVI port breaks my workflow.

The reason I bought the $399 complete care super warranty was that I wanted a stable machine and stable workflow for 4 years.

If you take the price I paid for the 1705 then add $399 to it, then you are just under $2000. Now take 20 months of depreciation on the machine out of an expected life of 72 months (standard 5 year straight line depreciation) and you have 1445.00 of value left in the 1720. If I assume that I can get $950 for a refurbished 1720 with the remainder of my complete care, the difference gap is $495.

So, to get back to the same workflow with a DVI out I will lose $500.

On the over-reacting side, I honestly think this is a valid and reasonable reaction to my last week with Dell's support team in Pakistan/India/Wherever they are. The only bright spot in the whole thing was a Dell Rep in Texas that said he can replace the 7900gs - but I do not have any faith in the 7900gs/1705 combo any longer.

On the letting a personal experience with a company affect my professional choices when buying at work - this happens every day. It happened with Gateway when our IT team chose to not put up with this same kind of thing.

On wanting a XPS1730, no, the 1720 would be fine if the engineers /marketing people had not be so short-sighted with video outputs. No DVI? What were they thinking! I can see putting DDR2 in the 8600M GT in the 1720 to keep the speed down to sub XPS levels, but seriously, no DVI just blows me away.

We spend an average of $1,000,000 a year with Dell. I personally spent about $40,000 with Dell last year and plan to spend about twice that on servers and a NAS system this summer. At this point the NAS will probably be a pair of Sun 24tb "Thumpers". Its still tough to beat the Dell 2950 servers though.

On your suggestion I will send an email to our inside sales rep, and field rep.

I bought a single computer that I planned to keep for 4 years, and I expected it to be stable. It wasn't. The single pipe 7900gs issue has been around for over a year now all over this and other boards. I just think that either Nvidia or Dell screwed up with the thermal characteristics of the implementation.

Also, the platform is stable. The i9300/i9400/i1705/XPS1720/M90/M6300 are all built on the same basic platform.

At the time, the 1705 and the XPS 1710 were close and the 1705 was less money. It was the best bang for the buck so I bought it.

As far as long term stability goes at work, yes, we only buy Latitude 830s, M90s, M6300s, and the M2300. They all will work with the D-Dock and they are all stable.

Now a question for you Rube - If I had asked you which video connector would get phased out FIRST in the future back in late 2006, would you have said VGA or DVI? We both know that you can put an adaptor on a DVI and get the VGA signal. You can't go the other way though.

Now I am just pissed. I knew the last tech was lying to me about not being able to do anything just like the very first person I talked to did. That very first tech said there was no way I would get any kind of replacement machine - over and over. When I asked to speak to his supervisor he said that his supervisor would also not be able to do anything - over and over. So when I finally got to talk to his supervisor it took less than a minute for me to be offered a replacement machine. He said it would be newly manufactured and not refurbished. UGH. I am calling these people back right now.