Dell. Blimey that was hard work!

Just spent the last hour or so trying to convince Dell that I have not dropped my laptop or inflicted anything on that would cause the lcd screen to bleed. They were refusing to replace it under warranty. I went through 3 different people but finally got them to do a replacement foc.
Its back to Sony for me in future, my old VAIo is a far better (stronger)
build than these flimsy crappy dell studios. I'll buy from a shop in future too.
I'm going to have a lie down now.

The Vaio's are more Dell Latitude range pricing really and they're better built, although they're still not great and yeah Dell's 'off-shore' support as a home user sucks.

Dealing with Dell and getting anyone to talk to you has become virtually impossible in the last year or so.

plop_pants – what make and model?

Second the comment RE the latitudes – they are very well built 😀

Sony are no better – they told my brother he had to scrap his two year old vaio. He needed to reinstall the operating system but didn't have the OS disk that came with it with special drivers etc. but they said they wouldn't give him another copy.

Agree with dell feeling flimsy. Sony seem decent in the shops and IBM (lenovo) are supposed to be very hard waring. i have a alu macbook the build quality is so good making the old polycarbonate macbooks feel very poor.

He didn't bin it did he Tails? You can generally download all the necessary drivers off the manufacturers website, (though admittedly I've not tried this with Sony) and OS disks are 'available' and if you have the licence number/sticker on the bottom of the laptop it's not hard to re-activate it once installed.

@dmiller – Its a Studio 15 (1557) with Win7 Pro.

I've got a Lenovo, seems pretty robust to me

plop_pants – sorry, I have not heard much about them.

Sometimes there is a key set of phrases that can be used to cut through the script to get help (assuming its not damaged) but I don't know of any for that platform.

We use lenovos at work, my boss is a serial laptop killer, and he's still on his first one (since 2007)…

inspiron here. bits fall off it most days.

He didn't bin it did he Tails? You can generally download all the necessary drivers off the manufacturers website, (though admittedly I've not tried this with Sony) and OS disks are 'available' and if you have the licence number/sticker on the bottom of the laptop it's not hard to re-activate it once installed..

I think he ended up selling it for spares. My bro is a proper geek so would have exhausted all available avenues – think it was a discontinued model from the US or something so no drivers available and they basically told him to piss off.

My bro is a proper geek

Fair enough. If he got a deal in it being a US/older model I suppose that't the chance you take with the aftersales service.

Sony from my experience have pretty appalling service as well.

Laptop, why would anyone buy anything other than a Toshiba?

Dell replaced the hard drive on my Inspiron the other week, as the original had failed, was a 180 originally, got replaced with a 230gb.

Sony Vaio, killed one of those at work in a year or so.

Work uses Varios and Lattitudes – the Lattitudes last longer.

Got a two year old Inspiron at home – It works, it's OK but it doesn't get much hammer anyway

I've got a latitude D630 with work and in 2 1/2 years I've had

2 x new motherboard
1 x screen and lid
1 x keyboard
1 x hard drive
1 x fan
1 x new usb ports (is that part of motherboard?)

All of the above has been in the last 6 months, and it gets a lot of abuse – used all of the time in cars, battery is often ran very low, charged up off in car chargers, usb ports used all of the time and connecting cables stressed, exposed to dust, rattled around on car passenger seat whilst I'm driving, etc etc.

Despite the above problems, I actually think they are pretty good. The customer service for business customers is very good – all faults are fixed next day. Last time I rang I initially spoke to a call centre in India, then promptly got transferred to somebody in Glasgow. I bet the personal customers stay on the line to the Indian call centres 😥

Yeah, but think what you'd have done to a Vario

We've been using a Lenovo from Laptop Shop for some 2 years and apart from the battery getting poor it's great. Ok, Vista sucks, nowt new here, and will be replaced very soon with Mint (or whatever Mrs H wants), but the laptop has been faultless so far.
Even my ancient ThinkPad from the Win2000 days works faultlessly despite being flown in main luggage on Ryanair several times 😀

Last time I rang I initially spoke to a call centre in India, then promptly got transferred to somebody in Glasgow. I bet the personal customers stay on the line to the Indian call centres

Its the warranty rather than the customer type that routes the call. For example a latitude with basic next day will go to india support, even if you buy a lot of them. A latitude with Pro-Support / Dell Business Support / Gold + above support will route to Glasgow, even if you only buy one of them.

I guess someone at your office bought what would have been Dell Business Support at the time. Which is a very nice add on – not so much for where you speak to – at the end of the day next day support is next day support whether you speak to Glasgow or India, but the add-on allows a limited amount of best effort software support. This boils down to we will help you with whatever you want software wise, as long as we have the capacity (ie we don't have a lot of calls queuing). Way back when I used to do that support (5 years ago now!) I spent many a happy hour setting up bluetooth links with mobile phones, helping people with excel spreadsheets, setting up word templates etc. You also get a named tech dealing with your issue – so you have a single person to email to chase for updates etc rather then needing to call in all the time. Personally anything I buy from Dell has pro-support on it.

If you have a pure consumer product (studios / inspirons etc) then I don't think you can actually buy pro-support for them so you would always route to India.

***Disclaimer***
This might all be wrong and is certainly open to change at any time!

Many other laptop vendors are out there – they certainly all offer the same level of support if you pay for it.

David.