The Nightmare of Buying a Dell Computer

If you think all computers are alike, there are some things you might want to consider. They are not all created equal, nor are their services.

Frank bought a Dell for his oldest son. "I just don't get it," he sighed. "I made the payments they asked for, but after two orders for ink, they wouldn't let me buy any more. My son had to do a lot of printing for his school work, but they wouldn't let me buy enough ink. And to make it worse, I had to get a friend of mine to order the ink and pay him for it!"

Rosemary bought a Dell and discovered that their bookkeeping was a little odd, to say the least. "I made the required payments on time, every month. But the total never seemed to go down. Then I missed a month by mistake and the payments went crazy. Instead of the fifty dollars I had been paying, they wanted a hundred! So I managed to pay the hundred for a few months and my debt increased instead of going down. I now owe more for the damn thing than I did when I bought it!"

Donny bought one for his wife as a birthday gift. He had many of the same problems the others had, but a new one popped up just for him. "When we moved, the computer wouldn't fire up. I tried everything and the monitor just wouldn't start. It was a blank screen most of the time, with a striped logo than crawled around the screen." He said, shaking his head. "So I called their famous tech support. It took four tries and several hang-ups before I was able to talk to a real person. The guy gave me all kinds of things to try, but none of them worked, so he said he thought the 'mother board' was bad. He said someone would be coming to replace it right away. Three weeks later and I'm still waiting!"

Leanne had a similar problem with getting repairs. "I needed a repairman to fix my Dell and was promised that one was available. Then I was told that the company who would be doing the actual work was in Massachusetts, of all places. I live in Utah! It took weeks for the part to get to Mass. And then they couldn't find anyone in Utah who could repair my machine with the needed part! Oh, they called me every few days to tell me they couldn't do anything, but that didn't help much. I finally had to pay a local company to do the repairs (even thought my computer was still under warrantee)."

Sylvia, who shared many of the same problems and still owes more than the computer was worth when she bought it three years ago, summed it up very nicely. "Computers are wonderful things. I'd be lost without mine. But if I ever get it paid off, I'll sell it to someone I don't like and buy a Gateway!"