by Josh Peffer

Created on: June 19, 2009

My personal experience with Dell computers and Dell all around as a company was horrible. I decided to buy a Dell Vostro 1000. It had a 2.0 GHz processor. And it didn't even have a video card. It has a video accelerator. This was my first and only purchase with Dell. Which is sold in their small business department of computers. It was a laptop that wasn't the top of the line but still pretty decent. It cost my around $500. It worked out fine when I first had it. Or so I thought. Then whenever i tried to plug in an external hard drive or USB flash drive or any other USB storage device it would instantly corrupt the device. I tried plugging them into all of the USB ports, I even tried to reinstall Windows. Yet, the computer still refused to work. So I decided to call Dell and get their support.

When I called them, they had me do all of the typical things like describe the problem and give them my computer's license number and what not. And then they put me on hold for about an hour. Luckily I had used my home phone. If I had used my cell, they would have used all of my minutes in one phone call. Then they had me do the exact same thing I had already done. They had me try all of the USB ports. Same problem. They had me reinstall Windows again. Meaning I lost all of my info and everything on my computer. Again... This took a couple hours to do. Because they insisted on walking me through the entire thing. Including the installation of the drivers. Eventually they decided to just send me a new hard drive and see if that worked. I put the new hard drive in, and it still didn't work. Then I had to call them back and deal with the same thing. Re-explain all of what had happened, even though they had the case on file. Then they decided to send me a new laptop.

The new laptop worked completely fine. But with that horrible experience and the crappy quality of the computer. I still own this horrible laptop and the only reason I use it is for a personal server or for download things that could potentially give me viruses. That is one thing that it is good at. I think that Dell is a horrible company that charges way to much for their computers. If you were smart, you could just learn how to build your own computer for so much cheaper. I have my own computer that I have built. Not from Dell. I spent about $1000. I priced it with Dell and it would have cost around $3000. Triple the price of what I spent. With a little bit of hard work I saved myself $2000. Dell is a horrible company.

Learn more about this author, Josh Peffer.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.