I don't think the problem is that they are "plebs". The trouble is two-fold:

- They are distributed between India and Ireland. The brains are in India, the management is in Ireland, and both offices employ people with such a poor grasp of received English that communications with them and between them is appalling. The call queuing system means that if a call is passed between offices (typically between India and Ireland, but sometimes within them) take an unbelievable time, anything up to 40 minutes in my experience. I have had four-five hour support calls, most of which has been taken up with music on hold and then re-explaining the dificulty to the next person.

- Individuals are not empowered to take any decisions outside their procedures, and if the problem does not fit the procedures they try to just terminate the call, rather like an error message terminating a program.

Our experience is much worse than that of amanoffewwords. I don't think we have had any DOAs, but innumerable problems with keyboards, disks, power supplies, screens, touch pads, the lot.

Having had over 30 Dell laptops, about 10 desktops and at least two servers, we would not dream of buying anything from them ever again, unless they announce that they have brought their support desk back in house.

Will

wahey, i'm up and running!
 

I am online and e-mailing from my new laptop! It's not the Dell. On further inspection of the offer for £600 by the time you add VAT and postage and their seemingly mandatory £176.00 warranty and service! you are up around the £1000.00 mark!! bit of a disappointment really!

Whilst looking for PC World on the search engine I came across a sponsored link for europc.co.uk A scottish based company. They had the exact same laptop as a £799 one at PCWorld that they had sold out of. It was one of the ones I was initially considering.

Windows XP
Intel Pentium M 1300-600 Centrino
224Mb DDR SDRAM pc266MHz30Gb IDE notebook hard drive
14.1 TFT screen
internal DVD CD-RW Combo drive
56K V90 modem

£621.58 delivered inc VAT

(It is a Packard Bell Easynote T5 135 though, I guess time will tell if those Packard Bell warnings further up will haunt me!

I ordered on the internet sunday evening and it was here when I got home today (wednesday). It is what they describe as refurbished and looks like it has never left the wrapper!

I will say that I was concerned that the big box seemed not to have much padding in it and it did seem to rattle a little? hmmmm. Also the lack of an instruction manual for it is slightly concerning?

In the course of typing this my spacebar has started to stick a little. I will admit this is more than somewhat worrying! hmmmmm. any advice? Is it me or a laptop thing!

Oh well!

Fogbound,

You cannot complain about the price when you get a Centrino Chipset and a Pentium M along with a DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive.

The RAM your new T5135 uses is:

There is a second DIMM Slot so you can add RAM to the notebook. A second 256Mb stick of PC-2100 would do a world of good to boost the performance of that machine for you. ;)

No need to have more than a total of 512Mb. That is the sweet spot for WinXP.

Enjoy your new notebook,

Richard

Yup WC, this offshore-ing practice leading to a reduction in the quality of service. Didn;t have time to extrapolate my reasoning hence "plebs". Now, got to look lively at work... :(