Nickname: Nathan

Review: My employer has a generous program for employees to purchase PCs. We stopped recommending they purchase Dells when employees were treated rudely by Dell support. Some support issues took 2 years to resolve. My manager attended a dinner where Michael Dell was the guest speaker and Michael told him that users could not expect outstanding support when the PCs were priced so low. With that kind of vision, it was just a matter of time until Dell sales declined.

Date reviewed: Jan 30, 2006 9:57 PM

Nickname: babylam

Review: For those of you looking for an alternative to Dell try LAM Systems, Inc. Small builder dominating the educational K-12 market in Pennsylvania. They can build anything and back it up with great service.

Date reviewed: Dec 2, 2005 3:20 PM

Nickname: John

Review: The issue of the lack of innovation at Dell is primarily due to its location in suburban Texas, which is a conservative and non-stimulating culture with most of its tech having California DNA. The San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley has a true entrepenuerial culture of risk and innovation due primarily to the liberal individualism of the region. BusinessWeek should do a story on the reason why(culture) the Bay area dominates innovation in a land area that is less than 5% of the US. If the country club oriented GM was in San Jose, it would be a completely different company, and probably a succesful company.

Date reviewed: Nov 26, 2005 3:39 AM

Nickname: OnceBitten

Review: We've bought at least 10 Dell machines over the last few years. Some problems to be sure, but for the most part acceptable service and problems were eventually resolved. Now, welcome to Dell Hell. The machine I got--a tricked out Latitude D610--is less than one month old and it is a steaming dung heap. The "Warranty Abort" folks and the "Customer Scare" team are horrendous. All I can say is, that bunch have been well trained at psychological warfare. I don't have a useable laptop, but I have a peaceful (but cruel) solution to the War in Iraq. The DOD should covertly distribute Dell laptops to the insurgents. Then sit back and wait a week. A few calls to a "customer scare rep" and those terrorists would be so disillusioned and dazed all the Marines would have to do would be to offer free Apple or IBM laptops in downtown Fallujah, and swoop in and grab the whole bunch! Never again, never again. Anybody know the phone number for Lenovo?

Date reviewed: Nov 18, 2005 5:19 PM

Nickname: pookeye

Review: The bottom line is Dell will always be here, atl east for a long time. Dell's products are still very good, but they just have not innovated as much as say Apple did. As the article says, they have been cutting a lot of the services that Dell was known for. But HP, Fujitsu, Acer, and Toshiba have been slowly innovating both services and technologically, which I believe Dell has begun doing again. However, all these companies still need to learn that they really need to hire an industrial designing company to really help them in designing as well as Apple. Another note is Apple will be using x86 as well, so at some point Apple may begin to take a lot of market share out of Dell and HP. And I still believe that Dell should at some point offer AMD products. AMD's products have always given the biggest bang for the buck. All those that believe that Intel will always be better than AMD are definitely not with the times.

Date reviewed: Nov 17, 2005 9:29 PM

Nickname: IT wonk

Review: I am and IT manager and I've had a lot of trouble with Dell laptops: keyboards wear out quickly, the cheap plastic cases and latches fall apart, screens go bad. For the same price (or less) you can buy a Toshiba or IBM laptop, which is much higher quality. Dell servers are second-rate, and significantly more expensive than the higher-quality HP servers. Dell's tech support is a nightmare. At least a dozen people have asked me to fix their home PCs after they got no help from Dell. Most tell the same story: They called Dell with a problem, got transferred to India where someone would read through a script. After an hour or so of no help, they would get disconnected, and have to call back, and go through the same script with another know-nothing "tech."

Date reviewed: Nov 16, 2005 10:04 PM

Nickname: pinjer

Review: I am amazed by the comments I hear that Dell is more competitively priced than HP's competing computer products. I have found without exception that HP offers sigificantly more for the money than Dell ever did, including computing variety and superior quality machines. Also, HP's support is well superior to Dell's and HP is much more customer friendly. As for their printers, I wouldn't buy either of them with the overpriced cost of their ink refills. Canon printers blow them both away.

Date reviewed: Nov 9, 2005 4:12 PM

Nickname: david

Review: I'm in China now. And here, more and more people turn to Lenovo and HP. You know why? Because Dell's price is too low. People here don't trust the low-priced product. In my view, Dell has no innovation at all. So the time for HP or Lenovo has come!

Date reviewed: Nov 9, 2005 2:21 PM

Nickname: Kev

Review: As an IT director for a small company, I was able to save a decent amount of money by purchasing several low-cost Dell Inspiron laptops and some business class ones. The happiness didn't last long when 3 hard drives and a couple of power assemblies died. One of the Latitude screens is going bad (luckily, it's still under warranty). I recently purchased 5 HP AMD business-class laptops and have been happy with the price and performance. We're now a two-brand shop.

Date reviewed: Nov 8, 2005 3:55 AM

Nickname: Bill R

Review: I'm a systems administrator that has been running Dell shops for 12 years. Over the past year, I have seen a significant drop in customer service and product quality. Use of overseas customer service has been devastating in my opinion to Dell. That coupled with failures in several new boxes, and I am now trying Toshiba for my notebooks. Michael, are you listening out there?

Date reviewed: Nov 7, 2005 3:36 PM