Could Really Do With Some Dell Insight Please

Morning all,

Could really do with as much feedback as possible on Dell laptops and also specifically Dell Customer Services.

I've pretty much settled on buying a Dell XPS 15" laptop. The specs aren't really relevant, but it's 16gb RAM, 1TB SSD, i7

Anyhow, I need to go down the refurbished route as it's going to be a tad expensive otherwise.

I've been looking at Trust Pilot at reviews for people buying from Dell and having issues, either with the laptop working or with being able to even get to talk to Customer Services to sort a problem. The reviews really are horrendous. I'd normally take them with a pinch of salt but it reads like:
Excellent - 12% down to Bad - 75%

Now this has got me pretty paranoid. That's a terrible % of bad experiences.

So, should I be worried? Should I steer clear of Dell?

Their laptop that I was after, looks perfect for the job, but now i'm not sure exactly what to do.

Thoughts please?

you're probably right to take the reviews with a pinch of salt as I suspect most folks writing reviews are doing it because of problems of one sort or another.
I've had a Dell laptop at work for just over a year with no problems whatsoever until 2 weeks after a rebuild/reinstall of Windows 10 where it decided to bluescreen intermittantly.
Not exactly sure of the cause but we suspect hardware. Would I buy one? yes. Did I buy one for home? no - bought a HP x360 as it was a good price and the form factor was
exactly what we need. Good luck with your quest!

Thanks very much for the reply Joseph, very much appreciated.

A fair few of the bad reviews revolved around blue screen issues - did you manage to get yours sorted easily?

Dell was all over the place some years ago with their support centers. At one point they went totally offshore with unqualified help and poor communication and scripting. There was a lot of consumer complaints and the situation was addressed. Unfortunately I haven't had any recent experience to say what the state of their support program is now, but some of the complaints may go back to those days.

Thanks for that gonzogolf.

That's the crazy thing as lots of those reviews are very recent.

It's such a high % that it worries me, but Dell are supposed to be a very well respected company with a solid product

I’ve had Dell laptops for years, both at work and at home. At work, where I worked for a company that was huge and we all used Dell’s, the incidence of issues was very low. Even then, as someone who was a “semi” IT person, I often felt problems were due to mishandling. To give you an example, all my engineers (about 110) traveled extensively and I was aware that some literally threw their backpack into the trunk of their car. Those individuals often had issues, mainly hard drive failures. People that shall we say placed their backpack into the trunk gently, rarely had issues.

I personally had one hard drive issue, but it was because of the encryption on the drive getting corrupted.

As far as BSOD, I would take many of those with a grain of salt. There have been Windows updates that do indeed cause BSOD, but is that the cause of the computer, or Windows? Without knowing the circumstances, one can’t say for sure. In my small computer repair business now, I get a great deal of people that have experienced issues with doing updates and in questioning them it is because they are often impatient. Some of these Windows updates take a considerable amount of time and some people turn off the PC before the update is complete.

Summary, I have had good experiences with Dell, actually never needed their support except to speed up a new purchase. I would buy again without hesitation.

As far as HP, I think they to are a good laptop. Having said that I always question why I see their chargers in the Best Buy weekly circulars.

I use a Dell xps 15 for work. I've never owned a Dell in the past and the brand doesn't evoke the same love that Apple does, but it is a very good laptop and well specs for the price. Mine has a 4k display which is even better than my surface books. It also has a thunderbolt port and can run thunderbolt monitors and external GPS. My surface book can't do this.

In terms of reliability...as I mentioned its my work laptop so not doing any post processing on it but I do work with huge excel spreadsheets and power BI dashboards...really data heavy stuff that taxes the processors enough to kick the fans on sometimes but the laptop itself is really stable and I've never had issues. I've used Lenovo laptops for work previously and they crash pretty frequently if I'm not careful about overtaxing the hardware.

Those new xps laptops that were announced have piqued my interest for sure.

Thank you very much indeed, everyone, for your replies. You've managed to push the confidence levels up a lot by reading all of this.

One last question please @ john from pa.....

In your experience, do you think that buying a refurbished Del laptop would be an issue as long as it has it's year's warranty (asthetics aside obviously)?

My experience with Dell has been pretty positive when I used their support in the past, although I've had an XPS 15 for over four years now and have never used their support.

There have been some quirks with BIOS issues causing some weird sleep behavior but mine has been fine for a good long while.

Overall for consumer grade hardware I'd prefer Dell to HP, for their more business oriented I suspect they're fairly comparable. The XPS line, being a higher end consumer/prosumer line is well designed and built and should treat you well.

I used Dell in my business and have ordered a number of servers and workstations from them. I found the support to be top notch. However, I always order their Pro Support 24x7 next day onsite service. Their Pro support is much different than their normal customer support. You usually get right through to a human who speaks English and actually knows what they are doing and not just reading from a script. At least that has been my experience. I've had Dell computers that didn't have pro support and the tech support is what you would expect; not great, reading from a script, etc.

My most recent purchase was a Precision 7530 laptop for personal use but I also included the Pro Support Plus. I was looking at the XPS line but if my memory is correct (?) I don't think those are eligible for their Pro Support as those are consumer and not business laptops. That was enough for me to not order that model and go with one of their business models, which is eligible for Pro support. Plus, the Precision line is super powerful with more expansion possibilities. I have 3 NVME's in my laptop and I know some of the Precision's can have up to 4 drives.

You may want to consider also adding their Premium Panel guarantee (I think that's what it's called). Dell has a policy as to how many "stuck" pixels is considered acceptable and whether it is stuck "on" or "off". I forget the details but I think it's something like 3 stuck "on" pixels will let you get a replacement screen. The Premium Pixel guarantee will let you get a new panel if any pixel is stuck on (I think, check the details). My Precision did have 1 stuck on pixel, but it doesn't really bother me so I didn't even get it serviced. I know that stuck pixels do drive some folks crazy though.

If you haven't already you should check out the "owners thread" for the laptop you are looking at over at notebookreview. The knowledge of the folks over there is pretty amazing and they know their Dell laptops like we know our camera gear

tuttifrutti wrote in post #19063454
Thank you very much indeed, everyone, for your replies. You've managed to push the confidence levels up a lot by reading all of this.

One last question please @ john from pa.....

In your experience, do you think that buying a refurbished Del laptop would be an issue as long as it has it's year's warranty (asthetics aside obviously)?

I can't speak directly to a Dell refurb except for a purchase about 20 years ago. That was a laptop, a Dell D630. It appeared in all respects, except for the box, to be new, so aesthetics may not be a factor. The crazy thing was when the box arrived there were all kinds of accessories included. Things like a drive bay, two chargers, a charger that enabled use in the car, an extra battery. I initially thought I got the wrong order. When I called Dell, they said I got the last D630 refurb, so they just threw in the "extras". On that computer, as I recall, I did find initially an "unknown" profile. Since the laptop came with a full complement of XP rescue disks, I just formatted the drive and restored from scratch. That computer lasted until about 5 years ago; it actually was fine, had been upgraded to an SSD and then from XP > Win 7 > Win 10. I gave it to a local kid who had computer conflicts with his Mom that was working from home during the CoVid-19 stay-at-home. He loves it!

There is also a computer sold from Dell called an off-lease refurb; it's a glorified "used" computer Those are computers that have seen usage as a leased item.

By the way, should you go the route of the XPS 15, the link at https://topics-cdn.dell.com …top_setup-guide_en-us.pdf will get you the service manual.

Dell laptops have the advantage of very easy DIY to add/change RAM and storage, often at considerably less than the cost to upgrade while ordering. For instance, if you can only get a 256GB SSD in a refurb, with a screwdriver take that out to 1TB relatively painlessly.

tuttifrutti wrote in post #19063340
did you manage to get yours sorted easily?

Haven't tried to be honest, as I've borrowed another unit in the meantime. It was 2 days before lockdown & it was a mad scramble to get something I could use from home.
Folks are back in the office from Monday so I'll see what the process looks like this week.

I bought a Dell XPS 13 about 4 years ago and it has been a great laptop. No big issues with the hardware... let me think - OK, a few months ago the screen would go off color intermittently - but it has stopped doing that after a few weeks of acting up. The sleep/hibernation sometimes doesn't work as it should. I will find the computer closed but warm first thing in the morning because it was on all night, and a couple times it was pretty hot in its laptop case when it didn't shut down as it should have. I don't know why after 20 or 30 years they can't figure out computer sleep/hibernation. It seems to be a fairly common issue with computers. But all in all I am happy with the laptop.

I recently bought a desktop too from Dell. I found their website to be confusing to navigate and some of their product description to be unclear, and the help on the chat lines was not that brilliant, but the product was as described and seems to be excellent. The end result is what counts, I guess, and it is good for now.

Again, thanks so much, everyone, for your input. It really has been a huge help.

I've looked at other laptops for photo editing, and this Dell one always seems to be somewhere near the top in recommendations, within my price range

Something that crossed my mind, not relating to the actual thread itself, but when I get the laptop, I remember many years ago when I last bought a Windows one, you had to use a hard drive and make a copy of the operating system, just in case something ever went wrong with it, and it needed rebuilding.

Is that sort of thing required these days - what do you need to do, or don't you and maybe operating systems are cheap enough to be re-installed these days?

Cheers