Very Peed off with Dell... any advice?

babaduck

:mad:
I bought a new PC from Dell in Dec - 7 weeks later it had a total hard drive failure & I lost EVERYTHING (yes... now is NOT the time to mention backing up the data.. I know!). What really upsets me is that our wedding & honeymoon photos were eradicated & we've no way at all to ever get them back.

Dell have replaced the hard drive, but didn't bother reloading all of their own software back onto the PC so I had to spend 2.5 hours onto their Tech Support dept in India because the OS & drivers weren't working. I asked them to escalate the complaint & basically, the Indian head of TS has offered me a memory stick or crappy Dell printer as compensation.

I'm not one bit happy (as you can imagine)

Has anybody any advice on what to do next???

Thanks!!!

Xterminator

My advice is take the offer.

The fact is your data is your responsibility, and they are offering this as a goodwill gesture. You have no basis to take this any further.

I know this sounds harsh, but why on earth did you not back up your pictures to cd?

X

babaduck

They told me they would be able to save the data. Luckily we have some, but not all of the photos saved.

The point is however, a new machine should not have had such a major fault within 8 weeks of purchase - in that respect, surely it's not of merchantable quality????

Xterminator wrote:

My advice is take the offer.

The fact is your data is your responsibility, and they are offering this as a goodwill gesture. You have no basis to take this any further.

I know this sounds harsh, but why on earth did you not back up your pictures to cd?

X

Lydesia

You should allways back up your data!
And its unfortunite what happened, but take the compensation.

I dont like DELL computers at all, thats why my second computer i built myself. And its an absolute beauty, i just have it up an running today.
But, Dell tech service i allways found very helpful

Xterminator

Your right it shouldnt have a fault.

But under the warrranty, it simply means they are responsible for repairing the hardware, which they have done, i.e. they have carried out their responsibility.

The only circumstances where this might not be satisfactory, is

1. Dead on Delivery, eg never worked
or
2. Repeated hardware failures and repeated dataloss.

I have been in your position, and i know how you feel. However they have met their end of the bargain. They are offering you something here as a goodwill gesture. They arent even obliged to do that legally, but they are trying to keep your goodwill.

As i said, you are responsible for your own data. 2 months of data not backed up? You wouldnt run a business that way!

X

Xterminator

Dell are not the worst.
From experience ... they are not the worst.

(PS I dont work for or have any affiliation to Dell!)

X

qwertz

There are specialist companies like Ontrack that can recover data from pretty much any hard disk (water damaged, burned...). Obviously Dell will tell you that they will try to recover the data but let's be realistic here, that's neither their job nor will the people in the frontline have the skills/time/means to do that. They will just replace your faulty drive with a new one. Everything else will be a waste of their time. You get what you pay for.

lomb

qwertz wrote:

There are specialist companies like Ontrack that can recover data from pretty much any hard disk (water damaged, burned...). Obviously Dell will tell you that they will try to recover the data but let's be realistic here, that's neither their job nor will the people in the frontline have the skills/time/means to do that. They will just replace your faulty drive with a new one. Everything else will be a waste of their time. You get what you pay for.

drive recovery costs 1000+euro. hard disks do fail, i wouldnt trust any data on one to be safe at all quite frankly. with broadband most people can back up onto a web server on say xdrive.com or can upload stuff to streamload.com.
dell have done nothing wrong.

Mec-a-nic

Hi,

My cousin had the same experience, except it was a Packard Hell and it was 2 years worth of courting/Wedding/honeymoon/baby photos....

Thankfully, I was able to low-level scan the drive with recovery tools and got back most of the data after a weeks work.

Business pay a lot of money to recover data from trashed HDs, but can claim it back from insurance.

Sorry for your loss, but I regularly have to re-tell people in your situation the two rules 1) actually carry out your backups and 2) keep them somewhere safe.

mec

babaduck wrote:

:mad:
I bought a new PC from Dell in Dec - 7 weeks later it had a total hard drive failure & I lost EVERYTHING (yes... now is NOT the time to mention backing up the data.. I know!). What really upsets me is that our wedding & honeymoon photos were eradicated & we've no way at all to ever get them back.

I'm not one bit happy (as you can imagine)

Has anybody any advice on what to do next???

Thanks!!!

Thordon

I read somewhere that 7% of hard drives fail within the first year, as was said above, backup , especially important stuff, youll never find a commercial server without at least raid 1 to protect their data, and daily backups.

babaduck

Thanks a million for all your tips. I'm due to get BB next week & will use those sites you recommended...

I wouldn't mind, but I was using the oldest gammiest PC ever (no sound card, 4 years old) before I splurged on the expensive Dell & never a bother... bloody typical!

qwertz

You are absolutely right. Especially wedding photos. I would kick my own butt if I would loose them. Any my wife would be a widow because she would kill me. Always back up important data. And don't do it later, do it now. Burning a cd or dvd takes soo little time nowadays.

lomb wrote:

drive recovery costs 1000+euro. hard disks do fail, i wouldnt trust any data on one to be safe at all quite frankly. with broadband most people can back up onto a web server on say xdrive.com or can upload stuff to streamload.com.
dell have done nothing wrong.

lomb

a reliable free way of backing up important tidbits is ones gmail account. by installing a program called g drive one can drag and drop stuff to it and appears in my computer.
however the best way is xdrive.com where one can back up 5gb of data and to auto incremental backups of the selected folders for 100dolalrs a year.
the next best online way is streamload.com which has free unlimited upload. only need to pay if u need to download ur stuff again and its over 100mb or 10 mb file size.

nothing beats dvd backups particularly multiple backups every week onto a rewritable dvd. this costs nothing.

external hard drives arent bad, but what if the data is corrupt or worse your house burns down.

for priceless data nothing beats personal and web backups.

Capt'n Midnight

babaduck wrote:

They told me they would be able to save the data. Luckily we have some, but not all of the photos saved.

The point is however, a new machine should not have had such a major fault within 8 weeks of purchase - in that respect, surely it's not of merchantable quality????

They should not have told you that it's setting the wrong expectation.

about 3% of drives die every year (more in the first few weeks and more again after five of six years) the worst I've had was a batch where about 50% died between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 years old. - and they aren't getting better since people demand size above reliability. Have a look at the price of SCSI drives to see how much more expensive drives are when reliability scores higher than size !

CRWriters are cheap, another option is a second drive, another option is to swap files with a friend or relation so even if the house burns down you still have a copy of your data. Data recovery is a destructive processes - the old drive is ripped sunder by guys wearing space suits in a clean room and because they have the gear the charge what they want

I'll say it again - 3% of drives die every year - that's the odds.

the_syco

babaduck; Try using "Active File Recovery". I've used it several times in the past (3 Maxtor 200GB ATA drive's f3cked up on me), and I've been able to get back video's, documents, and pictures.
Some, or course, was unretievable, but I got back my word documents (college notes, etc), and video's, so I was happy.

kasintahan

Dell only assemble PC's.

If a hard drive fails (as they all eventually will do) it is not Dells fault.
Legally they are liable to replace it because they sold it to you, but they didn't do anything improper.

qwertz

Where did the wedding and honeymoon photos come from? Your digital camera? If yes, did you reuse the memory cards yet? The images will still be on the card (even if you formatted the card) unless you have overwritten them with new images. I could try to recover them for you.

babaduck wrote:

:mad:
I bought a new PC from Dell in Dec - 7 weeks later it had a total hard drive failure & I lost EVERYTHING (yes... now is NOT the time to mention backing up the data.. I know!). What really upsets me is that our wedding & honeymoon photos were eradicated & we've no way at all to ever get them back.

Dell have replaced the hard drive, but didn't bother reloading all of their own software back onto the PC so I had to spend 2.5 hours onto their Tech Support dept in India because the OS & drivers weren't working. I asked them to escalate the complaint & basically, the Indian head of TS has offered me a memory stick or crappy Dell printer as compensation.

I'm not one bit happy (as you can imagine)

Has anybody any advice on what to do next???

Thanks!!!

sceptre

babaduck wrote:

The point is however, a new machine should not have had such a major fault within 8 weeks of purchase - in that respect, surely it's not of merchantable quality????

Failure rate in one form or another on a new PC from the major assemblers is about 1%-2% in the first month. That's a failure of any component (not just a hard drive) that requires a replacement component or a technician to have an actual look at a PC and replace or repair a component or a component's setting. The figure was far higher a few years ago.

Assuming your PC came with a CD or DVD writer, actually start using it. For most people their photos are among the things they'd least like to lose. I'd happily waste large chunks of a CD and backup my photos every fifty pics or thereabouts. Reasonable paranoia is your friend.

lomb

why not just back up photos on ofoto.com or something like that its easy as pie.

the_syco

If all else fails, give us a shout. I'd almost try to recover the stuff for sh|t and giggles.*

*No promises tho, and I won't accept responability if I can't do sh|t, or that the hard-drive is/becomes f*cked after I try to recover it. Basically; I'll do my best. but I wouldn't want to be sued over it.

Zascar

Lydesia wrote:

I dont like DELL computers at all, thats why my second computer i built myself. And its an absolute beauty, i just have it up an running today. But, Dell tech service i allways found very helpful

I disagree, Dells are good compuers, but I think their Tech Support is Terrible (I used to work for them), especially since they have outsourced to India. Unless you are a business customer (and you have to buy an Optiplex Lattitude or Percision) and you can get to speak to Irish techies. The fact that babaduck's hard drive failed is probably not Dells fault. More likely Western Digital or whoever make the Hard Drive.

When Dell replaced the Hard Drive did they give you the old one back, as you may be able to get some data back wth the programs mentioned above?
Good Luck!

babaduck

Thanks so much for all your tips - I'll try to respond to all your queries

1. No, Dell didn't give me back the hard drive
2. We've used the digital camera many times since the wedding & cleared the card every time
3. Broadband is coming at the w/e & I'll store files in a remote place thanks to your advice
4. I'm still peed off!!!!

FuzzyWuzzyWazza

I got a DELL laptop in August, I have had to formatt the Hard Disk twice (my own fault both times) I would have lost all of my pics except I use a application called webshots. This downloads to you PC and you select the folder you have your pics in, it then saves them to a webserver, costs ~€30 a year with unlimited storage for pics. It has saved my bacon twice thus far!!
It's a community website, you can share your pics, send them to friends and even get them printed on mugs and what not. Best money I spent!!

RicardoSmith

What would you do if someone broke in and stole the PC?

Get a proper backup going. CD/DVD or a 2nd hard disk. These things are so cheap these days theres absolutely no excuse. Personally I wouldn't use some half assed web solution.

qwertz

babaduck wrote:

Thanks so much for all your tips - I'll try to respond to all your queries

1. No, Dell didn't give me back the hard drive
2. We've used the digital camera many times since the wedding & cleared the card every time
3. Broadband is coming at the w/e & I'll store files in a remote place thanks to your advice
4. I'm still peed off!!!!

There might still be something left on the card. Even if you only get one photo back.

Calibos

Syco's offer is because he is such a nice guy, not because he misread the original post as 'lost wedding night photo's' rather than 'lost wedding photo's' :D:D

evilhomer

RicardoSmith wrote:

What would you do if someone broke in and stole the PC?

Get a proper backup going. CD/DVD or a 2nd hard disk. These things are so cheap these days theres absolutely no excuse. Personally I wouldn't use some half assed web solution.

I'm sure that if someone broke in and stole your PC your second hard drive would be in the same Pc or if external right beside it

Keep a backup on CD/DVD in a safe or a fire resistant box. would be more beneficial if you kept a copy off site (I suggest my clients do this, data is just too valuable)

RicardoSmith

evilhomer wrote:

I'm sure that if someone broke in and stole your PC your second hard drive would be in the same Pc or if external right beside it

Keep a backup on CD/DVD in a safe or a fire resistant box. would be more beneficial if you kept a copy off site (I suggest my clients do this, data is just too valuable)

Good point, I forgot some people wouldn't realise this.

Jaeger

lomb wrote:

....best way is xdrive.com where one can back up 5gb.....

x-drive is STILL going? lol!

Can't wait to see if my account is still open on there! Started -and stopped- using it about 4 or 5 years ago

Capt'n Midnight

if you still have the media from the camera and the files wern't overwritten try REST2514 to recovers them