Dell complaints

[Priscilisima]

I'm new to this site and am a little confused, but I'm posting anyway. Here goes:

I've always been a Dell girl. Even when my first computer ever was an HP because I couldn't afford the Dell I really wanted, I was a Dell girl. A little over a year ago I purchased a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop and love, love, loved it. My only concern was that, looking at my hard drive's properties on the very first day I got my computer, WAY too much space was being used by the factory installed programs. I'm talking over 30 out of the 120 gigs. Anywho, I let it slide.

Meanwhile, I used to work in an all-Dell office. We had 6 desktops and 1 laptop. They were all bought around the same time: 3-3.5 years ago. Between October of last year and January of this year 3 of the 6 desktop hard drives, and the laptop hard drive went bad, crashed, and had to be replaced. It all started with blue sreens and a lot of techie text along the lines of "Your hard drive experienced an error and had to close Windows." The only way to get out of that blue screen was to reboot. Then the computers worked fine for a couple more days and we'd get that blue screen again. It was almost like a warning...it was giving us a chance to save our information before it crashed. And that's exaclty how it went.

Tonight, my laptop gave me that blue screen. It is officially the begining of the end for my laptop, barely over a year old. Needless to say, I am no longer a Dell girl. I hate Dell.

I'm off to the 24-hour Wall-Mart to buy a huge flash drive.

[FallenAngel]

Welcome to the forums. I'm sure this topic will be moved eventually to the right area

Bad hard drives happen within any and all major OEM's, not just Dell. However, even in saying that, it seems that Dell has somehow managed to keep themselves head and shoulders above the rest where the actual fail rate is concerned.

It almost makes me wonder if they are buying their competitor's refurbs for failed products?

One thing you'll notice about this company in particular, is how adamant they are that your failed hard drive ain't actually a failed hard drive at all, but a VIRUS! That's right, if they can smell a sucker they'll convince you that your dead drive is actually a virus and can be removed for the tidy sum of $129.

Unless of course, you happen to call in and get someone like me on the phone, who would tell you straight up that indeed your hard drive is now a paper weight, or soon to be.

[diashto]

As FA mentioned... Dell doesnt make the harddrives. They buy them in bulk (some 10,000 at a time probably) and put them in a box, and pull one out of the box every time they fill a new computer order.

They get drives from many different vendors, and every vendor has some drives that go bad. Most drives are rated for 50,000 hours MTBF, or Mean Time Before Failure. This means that on average, with constant use, a harddrive should last just over 5.7 years. Of course, in order for that to be an average... there has to be some that last 1 year.. and some that last 10. You got to be one of the lucky ones.

[Priscilisima]

Thanks for being one of the honest ones, FS. D, you're rationalizing the problem as if it's not a big deal. Yet, I've found many a disgrunteled Dell user, angry for no other reason than hard drive failure. This means that, as was mentioned, Dell's bad-hard drive track-record is head and shoulders above the rest. You would think Dell would know and try to do something about this. They used to have such an excellent reputation, now we are members of a site dedicated to people who hate them. You don't see ihatetoshiba.net or ihatehp.net or ihategateweay.net.

As a consumer, I expect that when I pay $1000 on average for a product, it should at least last long enough to pay or itself. I still own the first computer I bought in 1999 and it's working just fine. No problems. It's an HP. I guess they just dont make them like they used to...

[FallenAngel]

People hate other OEM's alright, just not as passionately as they do with Dell. To date, the only other site I even knew of openly trashing an OEM was compaqsucks.com or some such thing. This was years and years ago.

I don't think we're trying to rationalize it, but instead just explaining that this isn't just a Dell-specific issue. Dell doesn't make the hard drives. They buy mostly from the same or similar outlets that other major OEM's do. The difference being, they seem to find the worst of those drives and spew them out to the public, then denounce the fact that they're "bad" by claiming that it's just a virus or some garbage like that. Anything to avoid having to replace what they knew would fail anyways.

I know a lot of people that have HP/Compaq/Acer/Sony/Toshiba/etc, and they all seem to have their own quirks. Again, the difference being, no one seems to have as many quirks as Dell. In the press, they pass it off as, "Well we sell the most so it's natural that fail rates would be higher", but that's just propaganda. HP sells more, and their fail rates are substantially lower. Besides all that, when was the last time that HP ran out of anything, or had "delivery issues" preventing them from filling an order? Within recent memory, Dell has had to concoct some pretty fantastic excuses to validate why they can't fill orders. The "worldwide glass shortage" that prevented them from filling monitor requests was the one I remember most, just out of the fact that no one else seemed to suffer this so called "worldwide" shortage.

Guess Dell really thinks they are on their own world?

Bottom line is, with each mass produced system that is out there, the consumer needs to understand that their data will never be safe. They need to take steps and measures to ensure that the data, especially important data, be backed up on regular intervals because you KNOW that the hard drive will fail. If there was one thing I couldn't stand to hear from a caller it's that they lost "valuable information" or "years worth of work" because of a bad drive and THEY didn't take any steps at all to make backups.

It isn't hard to do. It isn't expensive to do. The majority of customers just prefer to live a life of blissful ignorance thinking "it'll never happen to me".

You mentioned a system from back in 1999 was still chugging away? Rocke will usually be the first to tell you why that is, so I'll give him the podium. My answer or reply to that line of reasoning will always be the same - this is also a time when systems were $4000 a piece. Nowadays, they're practically disposable for the cost you pay.

[Priscilisima]

I remember paying $1200 for my 1999 HP. I was a student, there's no way I could have afforded a penny more than that.

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

Yep, in today's dollars, new, my 1998 Dell cost $3500. And it still runs fine. 3-yr standard warranty I never used. It was a hotrod in its day, screaming 125MHz frontside bus, the fastest there was.

Two things have happened to harddrives since then, one to drives in general and one to Dell's drives in particular. Drives now contain up to 90 times the space they did then, in the same physical space and at roughly the same cost. Compromises were made.

Second, Dell's assemblers operate under metrics which demand numbers with no regard for quality. If they're running late, they'll leave parts out or unscrewed. They also don't take the time to handle drives properly. Until they're installed, drives are extremely fragile. Plopping it down on the table can destroy it, or start a chain of disintegration that will destroy it in a week, month, year.

Oh, and the oil vapor from defective Chinese capacitors can pass the absolute filter and destroy the drive, so most GX270s have had double the drive failure rate.
_________________
Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[Priscilisima]

You really seem to know your stuff, Rocke. I guess as a Dell consumer I should have known better...or at least expected failure. Now I know. You all have been very helpful.