award winning service

We love Dell computers, but most especially we love Dell service at our house.

The last 48 hours have been wild here. We depend mightily on our computers and our connection to the Internet. Both John and I do much of our teaching (all of it in summer time) on-line, and we work from home. I could go into the college campus, but John has no other option. So on Tuesday afternoon when John's computer suddenly stopped so did our lives.

I did some diagnostics and determined that it was the hard drive (not the motherboard) that had crashed. So we got out our Dell info and placed a call. In a process that took nearly two hours, and huge amount of patience from the Dell service technician somewhere on the Indian subcontinent, we were guided through further diagnostics, including how to open up the computer chassis and check various connections. The process was interrupted by the phone (or phone jack) in John's office dying. The Dell technician actually called back five times before we were able to reconnect with her on a working phone. Unfortunately it was a phone in another room of the house, she had to wait while we disconnected the computer and brought it to the phone location, checked the connections according to her instructions (me on the phone calling out instructions to John with the computer), and then she had to wait again, while we hauled the CPU back to the office to hook it up again and check for any progress. In the end, our wonderfully patient Dell technician ordered us a new hard drive and operating system and driver disks (which we never received initially one of the rare times Dell messed up).

In an amazing display of efficiency, the part and disks were delivered to a service technician in West Virginia by Wednesday morning, who contacted us and made an appointment for late Wednesday to make the repair. The local service technician managed to fit us in at the end of a very long day of driving all over eastern Kentucky, and by 9 PM we had a new hard drive installed and the process of installing the operating system underway.

We ran into a glitch about 11 PM when through our ignorance we had failed to install the drivers (sound, video and most importantly Ethernet) properly. Once again, a Dell service technician managed to talk us through, step by step, installing first the Ethernet driver, helping us set up our Internet account anew, got us to the Dell service site to download and properly install all the rest of the drivers that we needed.

By 1 AM, John's computer was back functioning properly, connected to the Internet and able to check his e-mail and student forums. [He still had to reinstall MS Office this morning so he could grade all his student papers, but the hard work was done.]

First thing this morning, I pulled out the letter I got three days ago asking me if I wanted to extend my own Dell service contract for another three years, and called to sign up. We love our Dell computers, but its the Dell "award winning" service that really floats our boat!!