RE: [WinMac] Dell's or Gateways??

Ethan C. Banks(ebanks[at]pcci.edu)
Tue, 1 Sep 1998 10:17:23 -0500

Mike, Dell has been wonderful for us. Their tech support is actually useful
(as opposed to most tech support people who know less than I do.) With most
companies, if I have to call tech support, I usually get some kid reading
back a database query. Dell is different; they've actually bailed me out of
three weird problems with equally weird solutions.

Dell's support website is one of the best I've seen.
http://support.dell.com. They have complete file libraries that support
each system by model name, and they are easy to find and the downloads are
quick. They also have an extensive set of online troubleshooting docs that
are pretty good - although they start with the obvious (is the power on kind
of stuff) it gets down to the nitty-gritty pretty quick and offers solutions
that are beyond what you might arrive at on your own.

The quality of the machines we have purchased has been very high. We have
had no DOA's, and have purchased I would guess 100+ systems over the past 18
months. We have had a couple of motherboard failures and a couple of
monitors die. The turn around time was overnight for replacements. There
was a Dell tech here NBD in both cases for the motherboards.

Our most recent purchase was a PII 266 Optiplex GX1 system. When we placed
the order, the rep said they were out of 266 CPU's, so would it be okay to
put in a 333 MHz CPU for the same price? (Uh, yeah, that will be fine!)

The Optiplex systems are incredibly easy to work on, with a modular chassis
that includes a flip-out power supply and snap-in chassis pieces for the
floppy and CD-ROM slot. The hard drives fit into a hinged bracket that
comes out with one screw. The IDE ribbon cables are all custom length so
that there is no slop of excess cable disrupting airflow in the case. The
unused power cables come with rubber caps to prevent a short (overkill, but
an impressive detail).

Each Dell system comes with a 5 character service tag number. When you call
them about a system problem, you give them that number and they know who the
system was sold to, when it was sold, and all the technical details of the
system. You can also use that tag number on the support website, and it
will take you to a troubleshooting menu for your specific system.

Now that everyone thinks I work for Dell, I don't. We are a mostly Mac
shop; when we had to buy a PC for whatever reason, we were buying PC's as
cheap as we could by either building them ourselves or buying them from a
vendor whose quality was terrible (we bought 15 systems from that company
who will go unnamed - EVERY SINGLE MONITOR has gone bad at this point, and
the vendor has referred us to the monitor manufacturer for service - even
though the systems had a 3 year warranty, the monitors were only covered for
30 days. Grrrrr.) With those negative experiences of bad support and poor
quality products, we did some research and decided on Dell. We have been
very very happy with them, as my above testimonial suggests. We still buy
mostly Macs, but now that we are buying PC's with a more regularity, having
a company like Dell to buy from means one less thing we have to worry about.

________________________________________________
Ethan C. Banks - Network Engineer
Pensacola Christian College & Related Ministries

> -----Original Message-----
> From: winmac@xerxes.frit.utexas.edu
> [mailto:winmac@xerxes.frit.utexas.edu]On Behalf Of Mike Terborg
> Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 1998 9:46 AM
> To: "The Windows-MacOS cooperation list"
> Subject: [WinMac] Dell's or Gateways??
>
>
> Does anyone have any horror or better yet positive stories about these
> two companies?

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Tue Sep 01 1998 - 08:22:53 PDT