Dell

Just had a hee-larious conversation with Dell. Rang them up and told them that the CPU fan was making a lot of noise and was not making contact with anything else. He told me that it is normal for the CPU fan to make a lot of noise when the CPU is in use. I told him I stopped the fan using my finger and it stopped making noise, it had nothing to do with the CPU usage and we had another identical model machine not making the noise running the same applications. He made me create a new account and log in to that. Then he made me shutdown the computer and boot into the BIOS. Then he made me take out the fan and put it back into its socket (of course, I didn’t actually do any of these things). Finally he asked me to hold the phone up to the fan so he could listen to the noise.

You can just imagine me holding the phone up and him diagnosing that the fan was spinning at 3123 rpm, 100 rpm above average. Perhaps the power voltage is too high. Could I plug the phone line into the power socket so he could feel the power level?

Ring back dell after they do not call me back. After I finish my 5 minutes conversation with the helpful employee, which consisted of me providing details and her putting me on hold, she asks me to rate the call on a scale of 9 and to tell her about my experience with Dell.

This is how Dell offers such cheap technical support, they just send you on endless loops until you eventually give up.