Posted by Joe | Posted in Personal | Posted on 12-07-2010
About 15 months ago I bought a new Dell Studio 17; with the added options is cost me around $3,500. I thought I paid extra for an additional 12 month warranty on top of the standard 12 months but when I rang recently to get a faulty hard drive replaced it turned out my warranty had expired.
The guy on the phone went through to sales to get me a quote for a new 12 month warranty. He came back with a “discounted” price of $700, with some sales spiel about how with this warranty my “hard drive problem would definately be rectified”. When I told him that was ridiculous and that I could fix it myself he backtracked and said they could get the price down as that cost included all sorts of other crap I didn’t ask for… not so much Mr Dell.
I ended up buying a new 500GB 7,200rpm Seagate drive for around $100, swapping it over myself in about 5 minutes, then used Acronis Home to image my failing drive onto the new one to avoid having to reinstall everything (which I doubt Dell would have done).
It irritates me that Dell try this kind of BS as people who don’t know better would just pay. I guess the fact that I also bought a Dell Netbook just a couple of months ago doesn’t count for anything either.
