I get to be the geek that people bring their computers to when they have problems or find a virus. Not a big deal. Viruses have gotten so tenacious and sophisticated about not getting deleted that I don't even try to clean them off, anymore. I just copy off their data and reinstall Windows.
Last week a friend brought me her son's Inspiron 3250 with Win 8 on it. I searched around, including here, and including the official Dell support pages. I found several suggestions to reboot and tap F8 repeatedly to bring up the restore system. I tried several different variations of that, to no avail. Tapping F8 never altered the boot behavior. I could see the F12 and occasionally the F2 choices on boot. Neither of those mentioned the restore system.
Their support page said that they would not provide email support. So, I called their phone number. Connected with someone in India, which is annoying mostly because of the time delay, which got in the way multiple times. Was transferred between Software and Hardware a couple of times. The wait times were not too awful, so that was okay.
Finally ended up with the Software side. When I told them that F8 wasn't working, he told me that I would have to pay $240ish for an annual support fee, or $140ish for this single incident. This, on a computer that probably cost about $300. I laughed at him when he said that
When I asked if he could just send me the disks, instead, he did tell me that would be free, because it was covered under the current hardware warranty. So, back to the Hardware side for that. I get the disks, Windows installs in a few minutes.
While poking around, to make sure some of the settings were what I wanted, I stumbled on a menu entry in the Settings area of Windows itself that would restore the computer to factory settings. It was there all along. It would have taken the guy 60 seconds to direct me there.
I understand that this is a large company. I understand that they have to charge for customer-caused issues. I understand that the support tree is supposed to standardize service. But I am incredibly annoyed at how quickly they were to branch off into a very expensive fee for such a simple task. And one that their online support pages should already have posted.
I don't have any constructive advice off the top of my head on how to catch this situation. It was just an overall terrible experience. This needs to be passed up the support chain to try and catch situations like this.
Drake Christensen
