Well done Dell!

[Dos_Box]

This morning on my daily server room check I spotted a dead SAS drive in my Dell 1950 Power Edge server. I finished the phone call to Dell for a new drive at 11:40 this morning. The new drive arrived at 13:00!!
Thats service! (and a 4 hour server response contract helps too)

[DMcCoy]

This morning on my daily server room check I spotted a dead SAS drive in my Dell 1950 Power Edge server. I finished the phone call to Dell for a new drive at 11:40 this morning. The new drive arrived at 13:00!!
Thats service! (and a 4 hour server response contract helps too)

I have found dell gold support to be excellent

I can't however get Dell to sell me anything

[Kyle]

I can't however get Dell to sell me anything

I find this as well.................................!

[Dos_Box]

How do you mean? They won't give you good quotes or they won't speak to you?

[DMcCoy]

How do you mean? They won't give you good quotes or they won't speak to you?

getting quotes is next to impossible, talking to anyone is difficult. They have no licensing department for example. I always get put through to education even though I want to discuss enterprise products.

I've given up trying to buy any new things from dell!

[ZeroHour]

We found getting the regional walk-about sales people the best to fastest responses. You can usually always get them on there mobile etc and just kick them about the telesales account manager you have.

[Simcfc73]

Yeah I found Dell impossible to get quotes from too, they missed out twice as I was waiting for server quotes.

[sahmeepee]

This morning on my daily server room check I spotted a dead SAS drive in my Dell 1950 Power Edge server.

*makes mental note not to blow a load of money on "more reliable" SAS drives* Maybe I should be looking at SSDs instead...

[Gatt]

Well Dell are definately NOT flavour of the month for me at present..

Bloody laptop (Inspiron 6000) is still doing funnny things since 3rd Jan...

Battery needed a charge..
plug charger into wall -> Green LED ok, plug charger into Laptop - green LED on charger dies, XP reports Laptop as running on battery power.. Hmm..
Power cycle charger - Green LED stays lit as long as not connected to laptop

This happens whether laptop is power up or not..

Will run fine on AC power as long as battery not connected.

Called Dell who sent new charger - same problem

Called Dell again, 40 minutes later to a guy, obviously based in India and not very good with english, who then arranges for my laptop to be picked up and RTB'd for repair..
3 weeks later it comes back with a new AC Adapter..

Battery fully charged so I dont ned the charger for about a week..

When i get prompted to charge the battery, i connect the charger up, all seems ok until.. 3 amber LEDs then a green LED.. Hmm
Works fine without battery..
Quick Google reveals that it could be my battery has died..
A call to Dell confirms this..

So, yesterday (12th Feb..) the new battery arrives.. its got about 60% life so i decide to charge it..

Into the mains goes the charger, Nice Green LED on charger.. plug the other into the laptop... bye bye green LED.. same issue as before - AC Adapter losing power and won't charge the battery..

Now suitably pee'd off.. gonna need to call Dell AGAIN

[torledo]

*makes mental note not to blow a load of money on "more reliable" SAS drives* Maybe I should be looking at SSDs instead...

EMC have recently introduced flash storage option in their high-end dmx arrays. Here's an interesting article about the difference between 'consumer' NAND storage and what EMC are doing.....

http://blog.fosketts.net/2008/01/14/...w-thing-again/

i'd imagine the prices are truly eye-watering.

As for SAS, we haven't had any problems with our PE2950, not to say a disk won't fail. After all SAS like SCSI, SATA and ATA still consist of moving parts so anything can happen. Not sure what makes SAS more reliable, guess i'll have to read up on that one but i don't believe you'd be 'blowing money' by choosing SAS for new server purchases.

[SYSMAN_MK]

I can't however get Dell to sell me anything

Glad I am not the only one.

As for support can't fault them at the moment. Have had to have 3 laptop mobos replaced, 1 monitor replaced and a faulty laptop battery replaced this week. Takes 10 mins from picking up the phone to getting the ref # and then chap is out next day. First class.

[georgebush]

Had a bit of a rant at Dell today, I've never been able to get through to my account manager ever, he's always back next week. So I've now got his managers number and if this doesnt get sorted I'll be complaining to him. I'm absolutly sick of being forwarded to his answerphone for even the simplest of queries.

Shame because once you actually manage to give them money I cant fault them.