I like dell. They seem to have good solid engineering --- I've never had any trouble with their hardware (I am much more impressed by reliability then by by cutting-edge performance). I don't approve of the baroque PC design or the even more baroque Windows OS that they inevitably ship with but, realistically, I can't avoid them (I've never had any hesitation in erasing Windows on my own systems) I've ordered quite a few things though dell over the years but have never needed technical support until I helped a virus take over the Windows XP OS on a nice (until a week ago) 4 year old inspiron 700m. It wouldn't have been so bad if it was my computer but I was wiping the personal data off it for another so it can be used by a humanitarian project in Cambodia (just because I'm nice and my sister asked me to) and replacing XP with debian just wont do. So, I am in possession of a computer that needs to run XP, the XP on disk has been irretrievably corrupted as was the on-disk recovery partition, I am not the owner on file for the computer, the hardware is out of warranty, I don't have my own XP installation disk and I have a one-week deadline to get this thing working again before I have to give it back.

So I need tech support to ship me a Windows XP disk to restore this machine to its pristine state in circumstances that are less than ideal. But the experience was relatively painless and the CD is in the mail. I wasn't like being enveloped by a loving parent. The first couple of attempts on Friday were abortive. The contact form via the dell.ca web page had a little Canadian flag on it and asked for my address complete with province and postal code but was redirected to US tech support who emailed their apologies and directed me to telephone support. Automated telephone systems are just generally horrible, but I didn't have to wait forever and eventually got to where I needed to be but something went astray on Friday and the contact info I left probably was mangled with the help of a poor telelphone line.

Trying again on Monday was much better (a minor hiccup in finding out a married name) but nothing painful. Tech support was incredibly supportive in fact.

Everyone loves to hate tech support. Almost everyone --- tech support made my day.