Does anyone have an email address for Dell Corporate Customer Service or Support? I have no regrets buying the Dell, and although in 8 months I have had a defective monitor replaced and now a defective HDD replaced, I would like to keep things in perspective. HDDs fail, they're a cheap commodity nowadays, and Dell honouring the NBD on-site service would have been fine, but the whole way it was handled is unacceptable. When I made 1st contact yesterday, I provided the Service Tag, Express Service Code and full system details slowly and clearly, and repeated whenever there was any hint of confusion. Despite this, the tech who called this morning was expecting to be servicing a laptop, not a workstation, and so asked me to contact Support again to rearrange. On 2nd contact, the moment I gave the Express Service Code there was a long silence. Clearly there was a mistake there and the code was for a laptop. On 3rd contact, after much insistence, I spoke to a supervisor. Turns out even the case number given to me had a wrong digit. Nevertheless, I emphasised that the tech who comes should be familiar with setting up a RAID 0 system. I have not swapped a hard disk before, nor have I ever seen how to set up RAID. From observation, swapping the disk and going into BIOS and doing the setup would take a skilled person 15 mins, 20 mins tops. Setup is pretty basic, just move through a couple of menu items accepting defaults and initialise, format disk and assign drive letter. This process took 4 hours! The red mist came when I told the tech to take a seat for 5 minutes while I restored the data to the new drive so that we could check if the setup was successful, and the call centre tells me they do not support data restoration. They would rather just leave and take the chance that 4 hours of blundering around might not work and require a return visit, rather than wait 5 minutes to confirm success. I see requests on the Dell forum for the same contact info, never see it being given. One thing for sure, if I do not make the effort to get the message through to Corporate, nothing here is going to change. The systems are no cheaper here in Asia, support should not be of any lower standard than in the States.
Fix why your workstation has the Express Service Code for a laptop and things should clear up for you.
It doesn't, the guy who took the call is one of those characters who makes mistakes with numbers, he did recording the Express Service Code and also giving me the case number. Plus, that will not solve the issue of a 20 minute job taking 4 hours. Never done it before, but I could have been talked through the RAID setup in under 10 minutes.