During Hurricane Katrina, my old faithful computer up and died.  My wife and I are both adjusters and we have been working claims jointly for over fifty years.  I decided to purchase two brand new Dell computers thinking and stupidly believing the advertising that they would make my life easier.  Almost two years later and God only knows the number of calls to India for tech support, I would have been better off with my old dead computer.

I've called Dell asking that they honor the contract, to which they reply that I must honor my end, by allowing tech support to rummage through my computer via the Internet to try and figure out the problem before they will honor their end......yea right.  I've done everything they have asked and still no sign of hope.  Over the past two years, they have replaced my hard drive, re-installed my OS (Windows XP) three times, each time costing me endless days of re-installing my software, some of which I have had to re-purchase the licenses, since I've already used up the allotted installation due to Dell, all of which has been at my own expense and loss of time, work and now I will lose a client.  Dell's answer has simply been well we're trying to figure this out and you need to honor your end of the contract.  When I initially purchased my computer, I requested 4GB's of RAM, only to discover that they failed to provide what I purchased.

Today, after my fuse, which is already short because of them, I blew up after the supervising tech from India, decided to again work on my system and now I am unable to gain access to any of my programs installed on my hard drive.  He now decides that he needs to escalate to a higher power, but the kicker is that I have no way of contacting them, they will after reading the excerpts of the past two years decide if I am worthy of fixing the problem.

I discovered that the University of New Mexico after having Dell computers found that they BS they got from the rep, was exactly that, BS.  They pulled everyone from the campus and have gone to a reliable computer manufacturer.

Do yourself a favor and NEVER EVER purchase any Dell products, as the tech support is of such high caliber, that you would be better off letting Mrs. Mcgillicutty's kindergarten class repair your system

I have a daughter that experienced the same thing. Dell sucks and sucks bad. Of course, our HP's problems have to go to India for tech support, just an unfortunate part of technology. We don't have bright enough people here in the USA, we have to send those jobs to India, and of course they speak such wonderful english.

I will stick with HP, even though I get disgusted having to talk to and Indian tech, our puters almost never fail us.

Tom,

I must disagree with your comment that there are not enough qualified people in the U.S. to take care of these computer problems. There are plenty of them here. The only problem is that India pays about 25-35% to there people as compared to qualified folks here. Pay along with usually no benifits make for a very cheap labor pool. This is true at companies where they have RIF'ed long time IT staff (U.S.Citizens) and replace with contract labor from India right there on the company campus. No high pay and no benefits are paid to these contract people.

I had read somewhere that Dell had gotten so much flack about outsourcing to India and the inability to communicate with customers that there were in the process of doing away with the India call centers. Guess that went by the wayside with sales down. My wife has a problem with one of our HP printers recently. She called the coporate number and asked that she please be connected to someone in the U.S. as the language barrier was a major problem. She was immediately connected to someone in the U.S.. She has also read that companies have to have someone available in the U. S. to help you if you request this. Not to sure about this. We use Gateway and while we have had some problems, they have been resolved with folks here in the U.S. We will use them again when these things wear out.

This is the same scenario with the clothing, auto, steel, or about any industry. As other countries emerge from being third world to 2nd or even 1st tier world, as long as their costs are lower than the U.S. the jobs will be there and not here. Even Mexico is beginning to see the effects of other countries taking away jobs from them and they are worried about the good paying jobs leaving there country for cheaper labor. It is said over and over that the face of business is now global and many functions can be done from anywhere. Granted anywhere is ok as long as the service is meeting the needs of the customer without the constant fights that are now so common with overseas outsourcing. If jobs are to stay here in the U.S. there will be some major shake ups continuing in benefits and pay to keep competitive. With the cost of education rising faster than anything except medical costs, I feel sorry for those who are just getting out of school with 50-100k loans to repay and the chance of high paying jobs are slim.

Our company runs on Dell NB, DT and servers and at this point I see no reason to expect better service from others. We have had to replace the notebook hard drives after about three years but we all know they do not last forever. I do think like with cars sometimes bad technology gets released.

Rocke, I was making a cynical remark about americans qualifications, I did bit mean that we are not able to handle those problems. We are more qualified to handle problems with computers, printers, etc., than those in India. I too have an HP printer problem and had to deal with those people for several hours. We asked for an American rep. and one pretended to be one, with broken english. What a laugh. Outsourcing can only be stopped when we stop allowing it to happen. Complaints to the companies who are doing it, refusing to speak to an India rep. and insisting on an American rep, persistance, persistance, persistance.

As a society will we do that, probably not. We seem to like cheap items from other countries. I would pay 10 to 20% more for an Made in America product and Janice and I shop for made in USA products as much as we can find. We at one time were to worlds leaders in manufacturing and design. Now we are giving our secrets to other countries so they can capatilize on them. Corporate America could care less about you, me, or anyone else. Bottom line profit is all they are after.

Dan, you can get bad in anything you buy, as most are not made here in the USA, but in foreign countries. Their pride, in my opinion, is not as high as our is, or should I say was. Dell is as good as any of them. My daughter just got hooked up with a bad one. Problem is, Dell, even with an extended warranty, just does not seem to care. I feel HP is the same way. We have lost personalization in our society, everything is not outsourced and automated. I hate that we don't have the personal touch anymore. Unfortunately, that is where adjusting is headed.