Dell build quality

Matthew Kenny — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 13:48:37 +0000

I’ve always been a bit of a Dell proponent, but recently I’ve been given several reasons to be dubious of the build quality of Dell systems. During my time at LFRS, I received a great deal of kit from Dell; all of which had to be tested before being recorded in the inventory system. I must have tested at least one hundred PCs during my various stints there, and never once did I find a fault with a new PC. There was one incident where a user plugged in a 95W charger (instead of the usual 65W one), and damaged the laptop, we had a technician arrive at the IT office the very next day to repair it.

In 2006, one of my friends bought a Dell laptop (an inspiron 630m), and when I saw the offer, I decided to buy one for myself too. The sales people were helpful, and I was happy with it when it arrived. I elected not to buy the optional 3-year extended warranty, as it was far too expensive for my student tastes. In March 2007, the charger broke (yes, the actual charger unit), fortunately, my lappy was still under warranty, so I got a new one. Kudos. Around a month later, my friend’s laptop developed a problem: the spring underneath the left mouse button broke — the button itself was still usable, but no longer had any sort of haptic response. Unfortunately, that was about a month outside of his warranty (as he bought his about a month before I did). Almost exactly another month later, the exact same problem happened to me. Dell has refused to repair this for free, even though it is obviously a build issue. Liam’s laptop has gone on to develop issues with the display, which I’m thankful to say that mine hasn’t (yet).

More recently, though, is the order that arrived at work on Thursday: bit10 had ordered brand spanking new PCs for the Dev team (yay!). The task of setting them up fell to the bit10 sysadmin (Les), Ross, and myself. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly until we lifted one computer out of a box… we set it right way up to remove the packing foam, and heard an ominous *clunk* from inside the box. Les and I removed the side from the case only to find that Dell had neglected to screw the CPU heatsink onto the motherboard! Surprisingly, the PC booted, but reverting to on-board graphics processing; the heatsink must have damaged the graphics card during transit (I’m just amazed it didn’t knacker anything else [as far as we can tell]). Writing it off as a freak incident, we reached for the next box. Inside this one, we heard more of a rattle than a clunk. Opening this one up, we saw that one of the PCI blanking plates was knocking about inside the case — fortunately, this one appeared to have done no damage.

It is my opinion, that Dell values its smaller customers less: LFRS will, in an average month, probably place around two or three orders with Dell. To my knowledge, this was the first order with Dell from bit10, and it was certainly my first order. I would like to be able to get onto my high horse and say that I won’t be using them in the future, but frankly, Dell does have very good prices, and it’s not feasible to build a laptop from scratch. I shall certainly be keeping my eyes open for alternative vendors, though.

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Dell build quality