BSD support?

[Fish]

On Tue, 2003-11-18 at 04:23, Chris Howells wrote:
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> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Tuesday 18 November 2003 01:56, Timothy Opie wrote:
> > I did a BSD-Google search for laptop and notebook, and noticed that Dell
> > came up more than any other company. I have been contemplating getting the
> > Dell Inspiron 5150.
> 
> Personally I can _strongly_ recommend that you do _not_ buy Dell. I ended up 
> taking them to court over a laptop which didn't work from the start, which 
> they refused to to anything about when they heard it was running Linux...  
> even though it was quite clearly a hardware problem.
> 
> I guess with FreeBSD a conversation with "Dell support" (in quotes because I 
> believe it to be somewhat of any oxymoron) would go along the lines of "Free 
> what? Can't do anything about that, we only support the hardware, you have to 
> be able to get the problem under Windows XP for us to do anything".

That's (at least in my case) not what happened when I had to call Dell
support with a hardware issue on my Inspiron 8200.  I'd had the machine
for about a year, and the DVD-ROM had become increasingly unreliable. 
It finally called them about it when it got to the point where sometimes
you could mount a disc, and sometimes you couldn't, but no matter what
you certainly weren't going to read the disc.

I call Dell support up, tell them I have a faulty DVD-ROM, and that it
will not read any CD/DVD.  They ask me some Windows-specific questions
(driver versions, service pack, et cetera) and I told them I wasn't
running Windows.

At this point, it started going the way you'd expect, and they told me
they didn't support FreeBSD, and that they couldn't help me.  I told
them that I didn't need software support, as it was a hardware issue,
and explained that the machine refused to read a disc to the point where
it wouldn't boot from a Windows install CD even if I wanted it to.  They
said okay, it's a hardware issue, you'll have your new drive tomorrow.

Sorry if I got a bit verbose there, but I wanted to put forth that Dell
is capable of providing reasonable hardware support, if you give them no
other choice.

Fish