Ten years ago I abandoned my Mac for a PC (for professional reasons). Now I’ve returned. I finally had enough with my crappy Dell laptop constantly breaking and Windows XP constantly annoying me. So I bought a 17″ MacBook Pro and I’m rediscovering the Joy of Mac. I’ve had this now for about 10 days, and during that time my two most common (and frequent) reactions have been:

• Wow, that’s really cool.
• Hey, it works, like it’s supposed to.

As a Windows user I had forgotten what it’s like to utter those words. I still have my Dell laptop running Windows XP Pro (which has Windows rot and needs a complete reinstall). I still need to use it for a few things, and every time I do the most common reaction is from my wife:

• Honey, it’s a good thing we don’t have children around with what’s coming out of your mouth.

Gotta go…can’t wait to discover some more Mac coolness…

Hope you didn’t miss my most recent Dell tale of woe. You know the one where Brittany believes taking proper care of my computer means turning it off.

So yesterday afternoon a new chapter unfolded. Just to review: My Dell XPS M170 laptop is a warranty replacement for a 1st generation Dell Inspiron XPS that wouldn’t stay running for long without shutting itself down due to overheating, despite numerous repair attempts. My current warranty replacement laptop hasn’t fared much better. It has had 3 LCD screen replacements (hmm…my fault again according to Brittany), one video board replacement (an Nvidia Go 6800 Ultra 256 MB), and one premature battery death.

I am writing this blog article while running in Windows XP Safe Mode on my laptop. Why is that? Because Airborne is en route to my friendly local service tech with a new motherboard and video board. Yes, the video board failed yesterday and I can only run in Safe Mode using default VGA mode. Normal booting causes a BSOD as soon as the Nvidia driver loads (and I did try an uninstall, purge, and clean reinstall of the video drivers). I ran the Dell diagnostic, and it generated a bunch of failure codes and messages on the video memory test (as I suspected before I even ran the test, based on how the display appeared). After calling Dell, their help desk decided — despite what the Dell diagnostic results are — that the problem isn’t the video board, but the motherboard (which passed all Dell diagnostic tests). Fortunately, I argued successfully for them to send a replacement video board in addition to the motherboard. They state they will instruct the in-home service tech to replace the motherboard first and rerun the diagnostic to see if it fixes the problem before replacing the video board as well. Maybe there is something about the motherboard that is causing failure, but the video board is dead regardless. I would be surprised if the tech doesn’t just roll his eyes and replace both to begin with.

This will be six repairs in 15 months, five of them major repairs of catastrophic failure requiring an on-site service call. Oops, seven…forgot about the failed cooling fan.

I’m at whits end. I’ll say it again, this (and the previous) Dell is just a steaming pile of smelly crap. There should be a lemon law for computers like there is for cars.

I have this Dell XPS M170 laptop, er… craptop. It’s actually a warranty replacement for its predecessor, a XPS laptop that chronically overheated itself into uselessness. Last month, Dell sent out a service technician for my quarterly LCD display panel replacement (OK, it’s the 4th one in 14 months). Part of the normal replacement is to attach some rubber bumpers on the display panel enclosure. They have non-reusable adhesive, so each LCD replacement requires a new set — Dell usually sends the bumpers in a separate box that could probably fit a case of 10,000 sets. Anyway, this time they forgot to send them, so the tech just reattached the old ones which starting falling off by the time he was driving away.

I email Dell, via their unresolved issues link on the website, and request they send the rubber bumpers I need. They ship them overnight in — surprise — a small bubble pack, rather than the usual gargantuan box. OK, these are just tiny little rubber nubs that fit over the screw holes on the plastic LCD laptop display enclosure. There is nothing special about them. Just rubber, maybe a 1/4 inch in diameter, no precious metals or stones, or anything like that. If you got these, would you expect you need to return the old ones? No, me neither. And yet, today I receive an invoice from Dell expecting me to pay for them because I didn’t return the old ones. They did not originally make that request, and did not provide any instructions or packaging for return. The most amazing part is that Dell invoiced me $69.47. They believe these tiny rubber bits are worth about $11 a piece (plus tax). Really! See for yourself.

I guess they need to reaffix adhesive and use them as refurbished rubber bits. Am I surprised? No, because my experience with Dell is that they are largely incompetent and the quality of their hardware is about rock bottom. And don’t get me started on their so-called customer service.

So is the fact that Dell is losing market share to HP, etc. really any kind of mystery?