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Dell Refunds Vista/Works With Two Emails
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Mar 25, 2007 03:59 PM
from the try-this-at-home dept.
from the try-this-at-home dept.
look@thealternative.ch writes "Although many people have asked for pre-installed Linux, and Dell seems to have listened, some still think that buying a naked PC won't be easy. But what about stripping it naked after you buy it? I managed to get Windows Vista (and a bit more) refunded from Dell Germany last week. The process was surprisingly simple: 1) After delivery, ask Dell Support for refund by email. 2) ??? 3) Refund!!! Read the full email conversation in the original German or my English translation. For the impatient reader: The refund is €77.54 for Windows Vista Home Basic plus Works 8.0 (that is 15% of the total amount I paid). The whole process took 2 emails, 2 more to say thank you, and less than 48 hours. The money is already in my account. Kudos to Dell Customer Care (esp. 'Veronika') for being efficient and customer-oriented!"
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Ah, the hot/nice telephone operator (Score:5, Funny)
But then she goes and does it with the next guy too. Dirty girl.
You must be mistaken... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:You must be mistaken... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:You must be mistaken... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:You must be mistaken... (Score:4, Informative)
Great Britain is the island which contains three countries - England, Scotland and Wales. The full title of the UK is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". Go back 100 years or so and you could chop out the word "Northern".
Incidentally, the "Great" in "Great Britain" has nothing to do with greatness - it merely serves to distinguish between Grande Bretagne and Petite Bretagne, which is on the other side of the English Channel.
Parent
Re:You must be mistaken... (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean slashdot.org.uk? Or slashdot.de? Funnily enough, it's not slashdot.us either...
Parent
Re:Ah, the hot/nice telephone operator (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ah, the hot/nice telephone operator (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Great ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
not quite, EUR 42.29 for Vista Home Basic, EUR 35.24 for Works 8.0. Google says, 77,53 Euros = 103,262207 U.S. dollars.
Re:Great ! (Score:5, Funny)
Chris Mattern
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple solution: When writing in French or German, use a comma. When writing in English, use a dot. You wouldn't use German or French quotation marks when writing in English would you?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"find it weird because they say cinq point cinq, yet they write it as 5,5."
That's nothing - a quarter is pronounced "trente cents" - thirty cents.
Re:Great ! (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
TFA forgets step zero (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Step 1: Cut a hole in the box
Re:Great ! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Spammer's Delight! (Score:5, Funny)
As you do not want the Windows Vista operating system, we will refund you the purchase price you paid for it (ca. 42.29 Euro gross). I would like to ask you to send me your bank details that I can mark the payment in our system. I need:
your name:
bank name:
city (of bank):
bank code:
account no:
The money should be paid back within one week.
Yours Sinfully,
Ajabaili Sakilikulu
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I hated dell... (Score:4, Interesting)
This makes me want to give them another chance.
Re:I hated dell... (Score:4, Interesting)
The first dimensions sucked, but they've gotten better, and they even seem to have worked through the problems they were having with their business models(the Optiplex 270's and 280's were pretty shocking, the 260's were ok though and the 520's are reasonable). I'd personally never buy one, but that's because building the PC is half the fun of buying one for me.
As for their support experience, yes you'll end up talking to someone from Southeast Asia(Dell left India some time ago) who barely speaks English, and yes they will be working really hard not to send the technician out to see you(assuming you have on-site support in the first place), but if you are sufficiently obnoxious and forceful(I hate doing it, but when I was working in support I just got tired of playing the game), they'll do what you want them to do and fix your problem. HP's support on any of their consumer grade products is much worse, at least it is over here.
When people ask me what computer to buy, I generally recommend Dell simply because their products are as good as most, they're prices are reasonable, and they'll be around in 5 years. I don't build PC's for people because I don't support home PC's, so Dell is as good a solution as any.
Parent
Re:I hated dell... (Score:4, Interesting)
Outsourcing isn't monolithic - there's no such thing as "outsourcing in theory" that you can have (or not have) a problem with. Outsourcing a development lab is a completely different thing from outsourcing a call center. The latter is always, unmistakably, wrong. And here's why:
If you force your engineers to staff the phone support, they have an incentive to minimize the number of support calls. They will thus pay close attention to the things people call about and will do their best to eliminate those problems in the next generation product.
The moment you create a dedicated "call center", you're already going downhill: Now you have people who did not make the product trying to explain to people for whom it doesn't work, how to make it work. But the call-center staffers, at least, are employees and thus they're still motivated to pass on enough information to engineering to minimize future workload on them.
But when you now ship you call-center to india, you have now created a corporate entity that has no interest in minimizing call volumne. To the contrary - they get paid by the number of calls or the number of minutes spent on calls and thus it is in their best interest to have as many calls as possible. The survival of the call-center rests on there being as many service calls as possible. Thus no information is ever passed on to engineering about the main faults people keep finding (how convenient that engineering is on a different continent now) and if the customer hangs up irately then that just means they'll be calling right back tomorrow after noodling around trying to fix their stuff for another 24hours themselves.
I'm against outsourcing of call-centers even "in theory". And "in practice". And "in anything else I can think of". It's just a bad idea all around - the brand suffers, the customers suffer, the engineering suffers. All that happens is that a bunch of hobos in India get rich.
Parent
Automation (Score:5, Interesting)
Enter your order ID. Enter your Vista key.. and then a refund is processed. The Vista key could be submitted to Microsoft such that it no longer authenticates copies of Vista on Dell PC's (XP/Vista activation and WGA knows the difference somehow, somewhere) and Dell can have the money sent to the user without tying up their customer support line.
Microsoft might be concerned that they don't get their money for this, but then again it would be against the law for them to do anything like force Dell not to do it, or insist that users do not get a refund anyway (the EU would have a field day and think up some higher billion dollar amounts for fines).
I bet it costs more to process it through 'Veronika' than clicking a website button would.
The uptake on this? I dunno. Maybe a lot of people would use it.. but a far higher number would not give a crap and carry on running Vista. I think shipping a naked/bare PC is extremely user-unfriendly and it also gives Dell a burn-in-test nightmare (how do you burn in a laptop which is supposed to have never had an OS installed on it? Do you then perform a military-grade disk wipe after you put the burn-in software on there? I dunno..). Putting the most popular, most needed for most people OS on the system (Vista I guess) is an okay thing to do. But I do think if you don't actually want Vista, you should be able to go through and click the Refund button..
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I kept the Windows HD as sold because I can't get any money for it, and it might, read *might*, come in handy some day. Not that I'm counting on it, but hey, whatever. If I could go to the website and get the re
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Or, if you don't want Windows, buy an N-series desktop or laptop [dell.com]. People keep complaining that you can't buy a naked PC from Dell, but there it is.
Now, whether it's much cheaper (or even cheaper at all) to buy a naked PC than the same PC with Windows is a different issue. I've heard plenty of speculation that, with the discounts Microsoft gives Dell and the money crapware vendors pay Dell to install their stuff, installing Windows on a machine costs Dell pretty close to nothing. I don't really know. I
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I do take my business elsewhere and for that very reason. I also choose to actively let Dell and others know about my displeasure whenever the subject arises. Forgive me if I don't choose to be put in my place and silenced by a few words from a coward. Especially when they do nothing but state the obvious.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually the reason you're able to refund your copy of Microsoft Windows is because of Microsoft itself.
The background story. Back in 1999 some members from the SVLUG and also a Slashdot editor (Chris DiBon
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Good burn in suites are run from trimmed linux boots or DOS/DR-DOS/custom os/etc. As a rule they are loaded from a boot disk and never installed onto the hard drive.
The biggest assumption in your post is that Dell runs a burn-in diagnostic. This is probably not likely.
I'm not sure how Dell does things on their assemb
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
All they have to do is decrease the discount they give dell on OEM copies of Windows to bring them back into line. They can give any number of reasons for doing this because the agreement would be confidential. This is already how they get Dell to "Recommend Windows".
Sounds good (Score:3, Insightful)
Finally Uh? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Windows and or OSes tied to hardware are for pure support cost reasons at this point with companies like Dell/HP/etc.
Even prior to the dissolving of MS only contracts, any hardware company had the choice to not buy into an exclusive package from MS and pay the $5/10 bucks more per copy. And even though MS took the flack for this, it was not an uncommon model in the software/OEM industry and it was also something that the greed of OEMs were eager to take advantage of to the loss of their customers.
I was part of a fairly large OEM company during this timeframe, and we chose not to save the $5 a copy on OEM Windows, and still maintained a great relationship with MS even still we sold naked and *nix preloaded on many systems.
Sure we could have signed a bundling deal, just like we were offered by Corel and even IBM in the early years for OS/2, however saving a couple of $$ per Windows system was less important than providing our customers what they wanted.
So Kudos to Dell for finally stepping up and taking responsibility for the product they are selling...
The best part (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The best part (Score:5, Funny)
Dell: Hi, this is Dell technical support. How may I help you?"
Customer: Uh, I want a refund for Vista since I'm not using it.
Dell: Okay, I just need you to answer one randomly selected question. What does "ls -l" do?
Customer: It displays a long directory listing.
Dell: Your refund check is on the way.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Based on the experience I had with ReactOS in a VM, it probably gives a bluescreen.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
(Oh, and it was €77, so more like $100 or so)
Style. (Score:4, Funny)
Doing things that way always gets me waaay more in the mood. Gotta do it slowly though.
Differences in your geography? (Score:3, Interesting)
What can Microsoft do? (Score:3, Funny)
A Mac without Mac OSX? (Score:3, Insightful)
The only reason for buying a more expensive system like a Macintosh computer would to be to run Mac OSX on it. Otherwise you can buy PCs with the same hardware cheaper from other vendors sans an OS and install Linux or *BSD Unix whatever on it.
All of this is very nice, but I did spot one thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Vista did not manage to recover from the aborted install process the previous day and got lost in an infinite loop of reboots. (I wonder what people do with a power outage during install as there was no such thing as a Vista-CD delivered...)
And I've noticed that some OEMs aren't setting up a "recovery" partition (basically, a second partition which can be booted directly from the BIOS which reinstalls the OS) any more. Not good at all. Heck, I took delivery of a PC only last week where there was no hardware fault from the factory, but there was something wrong with the OEM Windows install and it was stuck in a reboot loop. Didn't bother me as we've got a Windows site license so I could rebuild from our own media anyway, but that's not really the point.
Just to break that 77.54 down for you... (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds about right.
But how will DELL stop fraud? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about the US ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Germany BY LAW (Score:4, Informative)
Don't expect it to be so easy anywhere else, Dell gets a lot of subsidy from Microsoft for the 'Linux' games it plays.
Everybody on the world has this right; just read the damn MS-EULA the next time you reinstall; it's in there.
Parent
Re:Congradulations (Score:4, Funny)
Is there such a thing?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)