or have a very friendly contact?

I know there are far more important things in life to worry about but it does grate me when a company can get away with stuff they shouldn't be allowed to do. The short version is:

Before I ordered a 17" XPS laptop I called the Sales line to confirm the laptop comes with 4 DIMM slots so can take 16gb of RAM. I was told the XPS 17 does so I made the order.

It turns out mine only has 2 slots so limited to 8gb total when I needed 16g. You apparently only get 4 slots with the 3D card which I didn't want and the sales advisor never said that was the case - he said they all have 4 slots. I called Dell to complain when I found this out and say I needed this rectified as 16gb was essential for me hence my phone call before buying and they aren't intertested. I was on holiday abroad from when my laptop turned up and so when I checked it I was outside the 7 days of their returns policy. They refuse to do anything about it and now stuck with a £750 laptop which only can do 8gb when I specifically needed the option to go to 16gb (for virtual machine use).

I will never buy another Dell product again as the way they have treated me has been nothing short of disgraceful. They just don't give a toss and pretty much said tough luck for going on holiday and not telling us inside the 7 days. I've spoken to a couple of people at Dell now and they have all had the same lack of customer care is basically saying tough luck goodbye.

So I was mis-sold the product and Dell refuse to do anything about it - what a fantastic company. Live and learn.

 

Caveat Emptor. The seven day return policy is there for this sort of thing. It's unfortunate circumstances have conspired against you but I can't see you have any recourse unfortunately.

 

You do a "technical support fault" to get round the usual channels. I'm installing more memory but it won't fit - then launch into the sales phone call. There is a UK business support number (in Ireland) (you'll have to google it) which may serve you better.

What are you doing that needs 16gb?

 

thats rubbish, if you were told that it has 4 slots and you got 2 then you have a right to return it. you are allowed a "reasonable" amount of time to inspect goods if it was something as obvious as the colour of the car and you picked up and accepted then a month later said "hold on this is blue I ordered red" then you are probably going to struggle, but if its something thats less obvious and hidden from view I would say that you have at least 30 days to notice the problem... contact your credit card compand and tell them its not what your ordered

 

Why on earth would anyone want to use a laptop for virtualisation??

I wouldn't have thought a laptop would be man enough to support virtualisation anyway. I am willing to bet it doesn't have any hardare support for virtualisation either, but could be wrong.

Get yourself a HP XW8600 workstation or newer if you want a machine man enough to run hardware virtualisation. I have one under my desk with only 10GB of RAM in it and it is more than adequate to run VMware and virtualbox etc.

 

 

Should of got a MacBook apple don't lie

 

Lol Wurzel this replacing my HP ML115 server amd opteron quad core as this laptop is far more powerful (sandybridge i7 quad core with hyperthreading) and yes it does virtualisation quite nicely. I wanted the 16gb to run more vms than i can on my hp server limited to 8gb.

It was so i could have everything on one machine, my current laptop combined with the server plus a games machine (it runs crysis 2 in ultra detail) plus with optimus and 9 cell battery i still get 5 hours+ battery life. I'm just hacked off about the 16gb thing.

 

The HP XW8600 can take substantially more than 8gb

 

Did you order online or via the sales number?

If you ordered via the sales line then you should have grounds to send it back as you asked the question and was informed incorrectly.

 

Most sales companies record the conversation, so ask for a transcript stating that the sales advisor told you it had four slots and would take 16gb.

Steve

 

Cheers Steve, i've tried that line as I have the date and time of the call and the fact the memory slots you wouldn't know about until going to upgrade the RAM and wouldn't really be applicable to the 7 day rule due to not being obvious but they didn't care and basically had the worst customer service i've ever experienced.

I'm assuming from the accents and names of the staff it's a Spanish or Spanish speaking call centre and they were just appalling.

My only option now even if it wont get anything done about the laptop is to write a letter of complaint to a UK based address for Dell.