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Old 19th February 2008   #11 (permalink)
othellotech's Avatar
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: London, United Kingdom
Age: 38
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If you have the onsite warranty the engineer brings documentation of what you ordered. I have known them refuse to repair machines which have non dell supplied ram, and on one occasion due to a 2nd SATA being fitted to a 1425SC !
*if* the engineer checks and *if* he thinks its related to the problem then they might check the partlist - most of the time they dont care or notice.

Its often like pulling teeth to get them to come out (4hours is from when they accept 3 days later there is a problem not from when you lodge the call) but they do tend to just swap and check as far as the internals are concerned, so are very rapid on the replacement/time on site. They also call before arrival which is handy.

Its better to keep spares and not bother, and get a discount from your account manager for not having warranties IMHO.

IBM are the complete opposite - they'll spend 5 hours onsite trying to diagnose a problem, when it would have only taken 15 mins to fit a new mobo !

So the 2 extremes - dell with their "here's a new one" swap it method (which doesnt always fix the problem) and ibm with the "i wont swap it unless i know its the exact part at fault" (which is not conductive to getting up and running again ASAP)
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