I keep reading all these horror stories about Dell's support but have never had the need to interact with them despite owning many pieces of Dell equipment.
Last Wednesday my main test machine stopped responding. I went to the lab and found the friendly blinkenlights emitting Your-System-Is-Toast messages.
I tried to pull the fibre channel cards and disconnect the internal drives. No go. Checked all connectors and fans. Nothing. I also tried a different power circuit just in case my power relay was acting up. But the machine remained dead.
So I called Dell Support. Less than 5 minutes on hold and then a guy named Chris picked up. I gave him the service tag of the machine and provided a concise rundown of all the things I had tried. In return he didn't bother asking me if my monitor was turned on and whether the power cord was plugged in.
We spent less than a minute walking through the support wizard and he apologized for having to spend time on this, given that it was pretty obvious what the problem was.
Chris promised to send a tech to fix the machine the next day. Now, my lab is a few blocks away in an unmanned location. And it's cold a noisy to sit there the all day waiting for somebody to show up. So I asked if they could send the the new power supply and have me install it myself. No problem! Shipping to my home address saving me a roundtrip to Oracle's Montreal office wasn't a problem either. Within a few minutes he had three-wayed a courier rep into the call to confirm shipping details.
As promised, the courier showed up the next morning with a new power supply and (just in case) and replacement motherboard. Inside the motherboard kit was a everything I'd need to swap the boards, including thermal paste and syringe. However, just replacing the power supply did the trick. I let the machine run the supplied diags CD and since it completed without a burp I left the original system board in place.
Included in the shipment were two prepaid UPS waybills for returning the defect PSU and the motherboard. A note told me to call an 800-number and arrange pickup. I did so today. The courier stopped by within a few hours, and the parts are now on their way back to Dell. I left a note in the motherboard box that I hadn't touched it to save them the trouble of figuring that out.
That's the way to do it. Thanks, Dell!
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