Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 09:59:48 -0500 From: Fish <fish@fish-mail.com> To: Chris Howells <howells@kde.org> Cc: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: BSD support? Message-ID: <1069167586.689.28.camel@current> In-Reply-To: <200311180923.06256.howells@kde.org> References: <20031118115649.58e3574f.timopie@dodo.com.au> <200311180923.06256.howells@kde.org>
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On Tue, 2003-11-18 at 04:23, Chris Howells wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > 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
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