An exercise in passive-aggressiveness

[redswami.livejournal.com]

For most of the academic year my workplace has been having trouble with a batch of computers we ordered this summer from a major PC manufacturer whose name rhymes with the exact place where you'd like to see them burn. About twice a week, one or another power supply would blow. It doesn't cost us anything much except aggravation since we have a contract for techs to come out with spare parts, work their mojo, and leave our labs for the next machine to blow out (which usually happens about three hours before they show up, but of course by then they're already on their way and it's silly (though becoming less so) to ask them to just bring a second set of parts "just in case"). Since about December, we've been calling the manufacturer about twice a month to say "you know, we had another four power supplies blow out since we called you last time. Don't you think it would be more expedient to just replace the rest of them in one go, since we're pretty much looking at lemons here anyway?" Of course, we've been getting more and more insistent with this as time grinds on.

Well, today we received a shipment of 99 power supplies. 99! We don't even have a third that many bum computers left in our labs!

On top of which, the 99 power supplies? They don't even appear to be for the right type of computer, or at least they're rated substantially lower than the other ones.

Thanks, guys. We love you too.

Comments

[lolotehe]

I had an interview with them once when they came to my place of employment, bought us all lunch, and tried to shmooze us into replacing all our servers with theirs. They asked me why I preferred IBM.

"Because if anything breaks, they'll have it fixed in 4 hours."

"Oh, we have that service too."

"And how much does it cost?"

"Well, when you consider the cost of downtime, it's really only..."

"IBM gives it to me for free. They don't ask for extra to make sure their stuff works."

[jecook]

Oh, no. you *pay* for it in the higher inital cost of the system...

I priced out an IBM AnyPlace Kiosk for $work last December. The model we were looking at has *just* come out in september and actually met our specs. (as opposed to the piles of shite that we *were* using at the time, which blew out on average once a month, and had a 4-6 week turn around time from the vendor) We compared it with our home-brew equivlent of using our 'standard' computer (USFF dells) coupled with touch screens, and the home brew option came in at ~$1700, as opposed to the $4200 for the IBM solution. (and that was the retail price. our vendor was prepared to give us a ~15% discount on the lot of 15 that we would be wanting)

Was it pretty? Hell yes. Was it slicker 'n shit, and s00per easy to fix when stuff broke? Damn straight. Were they worth the extra money? nope.

So, we went with the cheap home brew solution. Aside from a DOA touch screen, haven't had a problem yet.

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

what'd they ship on, shipping pallets? :)

[redswami.livejournal.com]

Seven large boxes delivered by, UPS/FedEx/DHL (I don't know since I didn't receive them; they're just piled up in our lobby now for lack of a better place).

[azurelunatic]

Oh god. The BOfD. When my laptop's hard drive blew and was replaced under warranty, it got replaced with one 10G smaller than the original. I was ... not pleased.

[ace-brickman.livejournal.com]

heh- I had to Google BOfD (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dell%2C+%22BOfD%22&btnG=Google+Search).. Nice work

ah, memories...

[ace-brickman.livejournal.com]

SX270s FTL. Interning at a university student testing lab kept me well acquainted with a similar situation. An otherwise happy workstation wouldn't pick up an IP address. Link lights were solid, Solid Black that is.. Black as the new connection that the power supply so kindly made for the NIC.
No other errors (besides 404) or flags thrown. Sometimes we had a capacitor explode, but usually the only indication was no link lights. Guess how many driver reinstalls I went through over the phone in addition to the ones I made before calling? Yeah- about 150% than that of mobo replacements. I gave up and just started calling Warranty support whenever a computer in that lab 404'd (http://www.homestarrunner.com/404error.html).


/of course I kid.. I at least rebooted ;)

Re: ah, memories...

[jecook]

the 270/280s all had bad caps on the mainboards. We've had roughly 50% of our SX280s get new mainboards due to this.

Re: ah, memories...

[redswami.livejournal.com]

We actually had a few GX270s/GX280s earlier that had similar problems. Nowhere near as endemic as this, but it's still a worrying sign.

Of course, we switched away from IBM for the exact same problem. :/

Re: ah, memories...

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

I bought a dell GX280 off ebay... I've owned several before this (just "play" machines at my house that I have Distributed.net (http://www.distributed.net) crunching away on. Never had any issues thus far... but it kinda bums me out. I love th small form factor and all... we'll just have to see what happens. Luckily this isn't the PC I use for DJing every Saturday.

That one is an HP Pavillion a815n that I bought with a tax rebate back in 2004 I think. has NEVER let me down. No locks, reboots, or hardware failure *knock on wood*.

[whizistic.livejournal.com]

BTDTGTTS, though in my case it was hard drives. 251 of them. The year before, it was 89 cow mobos.

How many comps are under warranty with the texans? For us it was easy to pass their little tech test and get warranty parts without going through their call center of drool, then replace them ourselves. The cow people even paid us as they would their 3rd party guys for labor.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Sell the 99 power supplies and use the money to buy 30 good power supplies. The rest can go into the Christmas party fund.

[valiskeogh.livejournal.com]

let met take a wild guess.

optiplex gx520

Re: ah, memories...

[phrogg.livejournal.com]

I supported a company's worth of 520's at my last job, had nothing but problems with them. We had an electrical storm that zapped every last one of them, so we swapped them out for some old 270's we had in storage, and never had another problem (mainly because the 270's had their mobo's swapped out before they were phased out, due to the busting caps (http://www.news.com/Bulging-capacitors-haunt-Dell/2100-1003_3-5924742.html) issue).

[redswami.livejournal.com]

755s, actually. Although it sounds like the whole Optiplex line is kind of flawed. I wouldn't be surprised if they recycle parts and increment the number. "Lookee, guys! It's a higher number! 'Sall modern 'n stuff!"

[chiashurb.livejournal.com]

My criminal justice system keeps blowing out on me, but tech support only answers the phone about 100 times a year, and these days they get it wrong more often than not.