Complaint Review: Dell Computer Company

I bought 5 reconditioned computers for our charity's use and took 2 for use onsight, 1 for patient records and the other for administrative use. The hard drive in the laptop for patient records broke in less than 2 months. The administrative mini's motherboard broke after a couple of weeks. I spent hours with tech support who finally said both were unfixable and needed returning. I asked about swapping the good hard drive from the broken motherboard machine for the bad HD from the laptop. The tech gave me instructions on how to get the HD our. We paid to have this done by a local tech person. At least we had one working laptop to run our charity clinic.  I returned with a mini broken motherboard and broken HD with administrative records on a memory stick.

NOW CAME THE FUN. Dell did not send the return box as promised. Dell further said I could not get the mini motherboard fixed because the broken HD was not original to that machine. For Dell, the SATA drives are each different for each and every machine. They claimed they could not repair the broken motherboard without having the original working HD. Since I would not be returning to the charity clinic for 6 months - after the warranty expires, that means I paid $275 for a broken computer that had already been repaired once before reselling. That means Dell will not repair a broken motherboard.

Trying to follow ever changing solutions with people who speak varying levels of English has been a real trial. It always ends with "Dell has rules". Rules apparently mean clients can not get one computer running and we have to shut down a charity clinic for months because I don't travel to Guatemala weekly and Dell can not simply fix broken parts. So, of the 5 already returned for repairs computers, 2 are broken a second time around. That is a 70% failure rate for Dell computers. Not acceptable!

After multiple times demanding to speak to someone higher up, I "THINK" they are making an exception to needing 2 broken machines returned. I say think because the story had changed overnight previously this week and may do so again and they did not follow through with the solution in December.  Be very cautious in purchasing DELL computers. The tech company in Guatemala said they don't deal in Dells because they have a bad record. Maybe they know more that I did, unfortunately.