Is Michael Dell deaf?

probe

I’m shopping around for a new notebook PC. I have had several Dells over the years. The annoyingly loud fan noise from a number of M series workstations prompted me to shop around. I have since had two Sony Vaios, and while they are quieter and better engineered on the cooling side, Sony service stinks – if anything goes wrong, you have to ship it back to Sony for repair and it can take 5 to 10 days or more. Sony battery life is appalling – one of my machines gets about 45 minutes on a charge (even when it was new). Unless one removes the battery on each machine, it only has about 75% charge or less left in the morning while switched off and everything plugged out overnight.

I have considered Apple and every time I kick the tyres with this company, the message I get is arrogance and “do it our way” or get lost. I emailed their Irish sales operation with a query some time ago, and they refused to answer the question and asked me to phone them. The phone number they provide is a British quasi-premium rate number that can’t be called from outside that country. I don’t feel comfortable dealing with this company that displays such contempt for potential customers. A company that is doing very nicely on the financial front from Ireland – and can’t be bothered to answer emails or provide an Irish phone number to contact them.

Which brings me back to Dell. I’m interested in an M4400 with 256 GB SSD and RGBLED display. Googling around the place I come across lots of reports of “tinny” sound quality from the speakers and issues with the RGBLED display. They must be putting 50c speakers in this €3,000+ laptop.... And no BluRay drive. In any event if one tries to order an RGBLED display from the Dell website for this machine, it produces a configuration error message requiring one to delete certain items – but one can’t delete them! And there is no email address to contact Dell to point out the issue.

My conclusion is that Mr Dell is deaf (or has his ears plugged) in many respects – and I am not surprised that he has had to shut down much of the facilities in Ireland. They are not listening to the customer. Their www.ideastorm.com website is nothing more than an outlet for customer frustrations that falls on deaf ears :-(

Is there any decent, portable workstation out there, with a 256 GB Samsung SSD drive, from any manufacturer one can count on, with a decent battery life (and preferably a removable battery!)?

AlmightyCushion

Could you not buy a workstation that suits your needs in every other way then just buy a 256GB SSD and install it yourself?

mikemac

probe wrote: »

I have considered Apple and every time I kick the tyres with this company, the message I get is arrogance and “do it our way” or get lost. I emailed their Irish sales operation with a query some time ago, and they refused to answer the question and asked me to phone them. The phone number they provide is a British quasi-premium rate number that can’t be called from outside that country. I don’t feel comfortable dealing with this company that displays such contempt for potential customers. A company that is doing very nicely on the financial front from Ireland – and can’t be bothered to answer emails or provide an Irish phone number to contact them.

If I had a sales question, I'd call a company and not email them. They should be happy to have your business!
I don't know what number you called. Call 1800 92 38 98 and if you don't get someone in Cork in office hours you'll get transferred to America. And it's not a premium number. That number is on the Ireland Apple store website page.
You can see the number at the bottom of the page
Seriously man, the European centre is in Holyhill, Cork and their number is only listed number on the Irish store page. I don't know what else you are asking for.

Voodu Child

The M4400 can be configured with an Extreme Quadcore (overclockable to 3GHz+) and a Quadro GPU. So im not surprised to hear it will have louder than normal fans. That kind of power generates a lot of heat.

And it's a business machine, (you even have to go to their business section to buy it). So Blu-Ray and boombox speakers probably weren't high on the list.

probe

Voodu Child wrote: »

The M4400 can be configured with an Extreme Quadcore (overclockable to 3GHz+) and a Quadro GPU. So im not surprised to hear it will have louder than normal fans. That kind of power generates a lot of heat.

I don't have an M4400. The last Dell I had was an M90 - nothing over-clocked about that - and it got noisier and noisier with one browser window or a wordprocessor with a single one page text document open.

The excess noise in Dell notebooks in my experience is a function of a lack of attention to detail in relation to the air flow and fan speed management software (compared with Sony) and perhaps defects in the graphics card in the case of the M90. Hence my conclusion that Michael Dell is deaf! He wouldn't let the product on the market if he knew how noisy it gets... This suspicion is compounded by the awful sound quality of speakers in Dell notebooks. Dell is tone deaf too.

And it's a business machine, (you even have to go to their business section to buy it). So Blu-Ray and boombox speakers probably weren't high on the list.

This is idiot marketing *anker thinking! Marketing idiots who don't know one end of a computer from another. It is like saying "this is a business car - hence we don't provide a radio, and there is no provision for attaching baby seats".

People use notebook computers when travelling. They watch videos in their hotel rooms. They listen to the radio/watch TV news on the internet to catch up with news - especially in the case of Irish business travellers - because Ireland is the only country in Europe that you can't get at least one national TV channel in hotel rooms outside of the country. RTE encrypt all their satellite services, and use the Astra 2 satellite system which only covers the insular "British isles".

Anyone who wants to deal with video editing in their business will need good quality sound, blu ray storage capacity for large video files that won't fit on a DVD, and a workstation class machine.

I recall there was no built in mic in the M90 - and I got a similar response from the company - workstation users don't need microphones! Business people use Skype. From time to time one mightn't have a mic / headset to hand, and a Skype call arrives - and without a built in mic, you are stuck - thanks to Mr Dell - whose marketing idiots and product designers are not living in the real world.

The customer is always right. If they want BluRay or good sound quality (who would prefer bad sound quality?) they should be able to get it on the machine they select. If they want an RGBLED display, (which is available on this machine) they should be able to order it on the website without getting a stupid compatibility error report that can't be fixed.

Dell has closed its ears to its customers. You can't email them on their website to point out how broken it is. The website remains broken. And is getting worse and worse - because nobody can provide feedback on their frustrations with this sick bureaucratic company.

The faster companies that are deaf to their customers go out of business the better - hopefully the void will be filled by an Aisan or some other company that listens and delivers.

probe

mikemac wrote: »

You can see the number at the bottom of the page
Seriously man, the European centre is in Holyhill, Cork and their number is only listed number on the Irish store page. I don't know what else you are asking for.

I'm asking for:

1) a geographic phone number that one can call from anywhere (eg +353 21 nnn nnnn) - but preferably that they answer my simple emails without "please call us" especially when they give unreachable numbers. My question is very simple (see 2 below).

2) to be able to buy a PC with a QWERTY keyboard, English language OS, English language factory installed applications (ie iWork in the case of Apple) and a standard European 2 pin power plug as used in France, Spain, Germany, etc etc. While one can get the QWERTY keyboard as an option on Apple's French website, and the standard 2 pin power plug, you can only get French language iWork. Which is totally illogical.

You can get QWERTY keyboard in Ireland and English language iWork software, but you can't get the standard European 2 pin plug. (Ireland used to use the standard European 2 pin plug until some idiot decided to change to the big clumpy non-standard British plug non-system - which has been made obsolete by circuit breakers replacing fuses).

In an Apple store, the iWork software box doesn't tell you what languages the software supports.

I'm not alone. There are over 10 million people who want English language software for their PCs living on the continent. While most countries aside from France use QWERTY keyboards, Microsoft and Adobe software is country-language specific (ie they don't allow one to specify the language when installing). The position with Apple is unclear to me.

denat

From above posts, I suspect that a contact from Probe, whether by phone, email or carrier pigeon, could be the ultimate nightmare of any organisation's representative, be they commercial, private or public!

The customer who is never satisfied does exist and Probe is a likely candidate.

I can imagine a Dell or Mac representative getting an earfull from Probe about the ludicrous use of British Standard plugs in Ireland along with an attack on their corporate use of email and phone numbers.

Some people are never happy - it's a fact of life. It's such a pity they must impinge on other people's lives and businesses.

I'm now sorry that this malcontent has prompted me to waste so many minutes of my valuable time in replying.

sceptre

probe wrote: »

My conclusion is that Mr Dell is deaf (or has his ears plugged) in many respects

Well he used a Samsung for his personal machine for a few years if that explains anything - it was one of the things that led to Dell licensing the X300.

gamer

IF you want a quiet laptop buy one that has a 1ghz cpu single core.EG you could get a pentium 4 laptop on adverts.ie for 180euro or else read the reviews for laptops on the web .I would not expect a dual core 2.5ghz laptop to be very quiet but the ones with onboard graphics tend to be quieter than ones with large 500meg ram graphics units/ or gaming laptops.SOME laptops have the cooling fan outlet underneath which makes no sense to me .IF you are buying a 2k laptop ,do research ,most laptops have a low power mode which is quieter. OR buy 2 laptops , one 1ghz cpu model , another one 2.5ghz for video editing /av work.

LoveHiFi

I have an M4400 with blu- ray , it also has an integrated camera with Mic , speakers are ok but not a big issue for me , you do know the fan is working but again only at home or in quiet hotel room , PS they also built it for me with a US keyboard , but overall does everything I ask and well

probe

denat wrote: »

From above posts, I suspect that a contact from Probe, whether by phone, email or carrier pigeon, could be the ultimate nightmare of any organisation's representative, be they commercial, private or public!

The customer who is never satisfied does exist and Probe is a likely candidate.

I can imagine a Dell or Mac representative getting an earfull from Probe about the ludicrous use of British Standard plugs in Ireland along with an attack on their corporate use of email and phone numbers.

Some people are never happy - it's a fact of life. It's such a pity they must impinge on other people's lives and businesses.

I'm now sorry that this malcontent has prompted me to waste so many minutes of my valuable time in replying.

Moron customers who put up with crap quality are actually bad for a company/country. The Swiss and Japanese are fastidious consumers, and most of goods produced in these countries are excellent as a result.

Probe is not looking for an over-clocked, hyped up gamer machine that is totally silent. Probe does not expect a laptop computer to be quiet in a hot room (25C +) or with a zillion graphic intensive applications running. I invariably go for a lower than top speed processor option to reduce engineering bleeding edge issues, and use it in an air conditioned room. I’m quite happy to pay for an SSD rather than mechanical HD to reduce heat and speed up performance.

Dell’s next business day service in France was excellent (at least when I last used it some years ago). However service can’t fix engineering defects in hardware and software that cause loud fan noise.

Sony (which is run by a Brit rather than a Japanese) could copy Dell’s on-site service system, (and fix their battery life/draining issues) and they would be closer to providing a satisfactory product. But I’m not prepared to send my PC back to them for a week or more to do the fix.

Arrogant inflexible Apple and Steve Jobs is another matter.... My experience with walled garden iTunes software to listen to podcasts puts me off buying anything Apple. Even the new iPod nano (which I haven’t bought), which has RDS in its FM radio doesn’t display radio station names in Europe, according to what I hear. One suspects radio stations have to pay Apple for some proprietary solution to make their RDS messages display on the nano. No wonder Apple has such a small share of the PC market.