mcbeen.com

So, just incase you thought that those other problems were isolated issues, and the server support is better, this one is for you!

In March, the little amber light on the front of our 2600 started blinking. I took a look at the open manage software and all the indicators were green. No failures. I Then browsed through all the diagnostic lists looking for an error, but none could be found. Stumped, I called support and got a hold of a woman who pointed me to the Open Manage log. There I found the problem. The DIMM in slot one was getting ECC errors. SLAM DUNK! thank god…. Right? WRONG. She instructed me to go ahead and down the server and swap the modules between slots to see if the error followed. I asked her to just send out the modules, but she refused. She wanted to be sure it wasn’t the memory slot… Yea. Ok. whatever. I asked her to just send out a motherboard with the memory, but she didn’t want to do that either.
The problem is that this server is always in use. It is a primary system. Downing it is a major problem. After three days, I was able to get a window to work on the server. Unfortunately, the server is designed in such a way that it cannot be worked on in the rack. The covers can’t be removed while it is mounted. So I have to pull it out of the rack, then dismantle the cooling system to get down to the motherboard. I swap the modules and power it back up.
My luck was poor that day, and the error did not reoccur. I was destined to deal with this issue again at a later date… Today!
Dell likes playing chicken with their warentees. They try to push out repairs to future dates, after the warentee expires. Little did the last tech know that we extended our warentee.
So I call Dell up again… Guess what. They want me to swap modules! I just sent them the error log including the errors from the previous call. I’m currently waiting for the next hoop.

It’s hard to believe I was once a Dell fan. I recommended their hardware to many people over the years. They built their machines out of off the shelf components, and made sure that when things sometime went wrong, they were put back the way they should be quickly.
But things changed. Soon, Dell decided to scrap it’s three year lockdown for corporate machines. They began using proprietary designs and hardware. They raised their prices. They moved their support departments overseas.
When I started work where I am today, we were in the process of moving the entire company to Dell desktops. Things were going ok, until we started to have motherbaord failures in our GX150s. The machines would randomly reset for no reason, even when booted to DOS from a floppy. We spent over a year off and on trying to get the machine diagnosed to no avail. we were never ever to get any kind of error code, and we could never narrow it down to any one component. No matter what we did, the problem kept on coming. We eventually just retired the machine. It was still under warentee, but we could not get it repaired. They insisted on getting an error code of some kind before authorizing any kind of repair. They also didn’t want to spend time swapping out components that might not have been bad.
a few months later, we found the problem in THREE more GX150s. Luckily, these units were under Dell’s “gold” support program. “Gold” means that Dell will “waste” money trying to fix your machine. We got a hold of a tech who had actually SEEN the problem before, and knew exactly what it was. Turns out that quite a few Dell computers have trouble with the cpu socket and static generated by the CPU fan. It is a known defect internally. He sent us out a tech with new motherboards, and fixed the three machines. Gleefully, I called normal support back and referenced my gold support incident hopeful that Iwould finally get the machine repaired. Nope. No error, no tech. We called our sales rep, and he told us there was nothing he could do. I called tech support multiple times trying to get some one who would listen, but they all said the same thing. There was nothing they could do. The final guy I talked to told me to call Gold support and lie about my service tag, and use a tag off another machine. The machines still sits in my junk bin.

Last september, one of our Dell laptops decided not to charge it’s batteries any more. We narrowed it down to the logic board, and scheduled a repair. The expected repair date was DECEMBER 25. Three months. That’s right. I called them every couple weeks to make sure everything was still on schedule. In December, the 25th came and went, no tech. I called them back on th 27th to be informed my warentee had now expired. We called our sales rep, who once again told us there was nothing he could do. Fun fun fun.

We have since switched to whitebox and hp/compaq machines. So far no trouble. We call for support, repair tech comes out.