DELL Inc DELL Studio 1535 laptop, DEAD on Arrival! NO Replacement and NO Refund! Round Rock, Texas

I ordered a laptop "Studio 1535" from Dell in Sept. To my surprise, Dell sent me a damaged laptop which was dead on arrival. The laptop cannot be started at all and kept on showing pure color screens from the first touch. I called the customer service to ask for a change and they issued a replacement on Oct. 5th. The customer service said that the replaced laptop would have been arrived before Oct. 11, 2008. I waited for three weeks but the laptop didn't show up. I called Dell several times during this period of time and all I found was that they were holding my request to forever. Then I called to return the laptop because I found that Dell was not willing to solve this problem. Dell issued me a return on Oct. 28 and "arranged" a UPS pick up. Ironically, they didn't provide UPS with return address and all the necessary information, as what they supposed to do. Therefore UPS refused to pick the dead laptop to return. I have to call back to Dell and they claimed that they arranged another pick up, but this time, UPS never showed up.

On Nov. 15th, I received an email from Dell to cancle my return when I was taking a business trip in Hong Kong. I had to call them from Hong Kong on Nov. 19 and fighted with their customer service for more than three hours. During these three hours, all they did was transfering me among different people within same department, or to the wrong department, or just hanging up my call intentionally. Finally, I lost my patience and requested to talk with their customer service manager. The manager was the rudest person I have ever seen. After repeating my case, he said that because I have exceeded the 21-days warranty of return, all I can do was to keep the dead laptop, or get this dead one repaired. I asked for other solutions because I didn't want to have a refurbished laptop for 800 bucks. The manager refused to help out. He even said if I didn't mind the fee for international call, he can hang on the call with me forever. I had to give up because the international call from Hong Kong to the US was so expensive and I had a lot of business to do in Hong Kong.

I called back again on Dec. 5 after I came back to the US. I was again transfered between customer service department and technical support department back and forth like a ball. They just refused to return or replace the damaged laptop, very rudely. They asked me to leave phone number and email address, and promised to contact me, but they didn't. I am extremely exhausted with this purchase experience with Dell. I never expected that Dell was such an irresponsible company that they didn't even check the quality of the product they are selling. I never expected that a world-renowned company like Dell will cheat customer intentionally in this way: sent a damaged product to the customer, promised to replace in five days but didn't even get the laptop ready after three weeks, "arranged" pick-up but intentionally not providing any necessary information, promised to call back but never made the call. And I also feel discriminated because of my accent during the process of communication with the customer service, by being transfered to wrong department for numerous times and being hung up for several times purposely. The attitude of the customer services was terrible, especially the manager of the customer service was discriminatorily impatient and rude. I spent a lot of time and money in dealing with Dell to solve this problem. My work and my personal life was significantly ruined.

Jianfeng
Brookline, Massachusetts
U.S.A.