Buying a PC With Dell: My Journey Into Hell
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- Опубліковано 16 лип 2021
- I bought a PC from Dell.
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First mistake was buying Dell SMH
We love you and we are 1.8m properly if you ask us any thing we will come up with good answers take care and remember we are here for you.
Everybody needs to have a nerd friend that knows computers that can go over everything before you buy... oh turns out that's the lesson of the video nvm.
talk about re zero
Been there, multiple times. And I'm an IT professional. Buying a PC is surprisingly difficult for untrained people, and it shouldn't be. Dell's customer service is notoriously bad.
So that's why the repair guy kept finding "noone home", they were BSing you until your refund period was up
That is some dirty handed stuff.... now that you said that.
What kind of terrible, evil, downright extortionate company would do…..oh, wait. You bought a dell….
Many companies do this unfortunately
Even outside of electronics
Holy shit.
Boosting this comment
Basically, Wolf just invented a new genre of horror.
Psychological customer service horror.
Tlet me tell you this tale is as old as corporations
Kafkaesque horror includes this.
Content for this genre stampedes across the tundra . . .
chokes the air . . .
floods the sea . . .
obscures the sky . . .
Ohhh
this
The idea that they delayed the repair man until after the two week repair window was up is EXTRA scummy
So you've met Dell. :) Dell does some VERY scummy things.
From the first "it took longer to boot up than my old PC" I knew exactly what the problem was, I waited for confirmation, and then I cried for the rest of the video.
Exactly, I immediately thought "wait... They wouldn't install his OS in an HDD right?"
So if you weren't some kind of internet celebrity, this literally would never have been resolved and you would've been down thousands of dollars. Epic company
Basically
As someone who is a not famous victim of Dell, yes.
Yep, and even now, they refuse to do the right thing, and this video is just more free marketing for Dell.
Don't go with Dell. I would literally tell my bank that they didn't deliver what they promised, and that they did not give me the machine I paid for. Immediate money back in your account, and Dell can come get the computer if they want it back.
I think it depends on how much of a stink he would have raised as a consumer and raising said stink on the internet was the way to go. It being public and the more far reaching the better. As he said about "The Closer" she was sent to get the job done, because the job not being done was a PR disaster for them. So like someone berating people at their local store, not a proud victory, but a victory none the less.
Yup, that's literally the only reason I didn't choose a Dell when I was selecting a new pc 2 years ago. You'll find thousands of extremely bad experiences online, by normal customers that aren't famous and were treated like shit by Dell's customer service.
I guess if you're not famous but your tweets\instagram posts\any social media post about Dell go viral, they'll do the same as well, but otherwise they ain't gonna fix it if you're a normal customer.
You only had two weeks to get a refund, and they spent more than 2 weeks, getting a repair person to you...before refusing you a refund...That's fucked up.
Yeah, that seems the single indisputably scuzziest thing they did here.
This is like watching an alchemist trying to make gold, making a homoculious that barely looks human, but still acts like an toddler and the wizard, never wanting children, stares in horror at what is not gold
Oh no you had to send the homoculious to college /(._.)\ I’m so sorry man
That’s hilarious lol
What
Isn't that the plot of Fullmetal Alchemist?
High quality comment, S+++
As a former technician who had to support Dell PCs and laptops for several years, this video had me laughing like crazy at points. Not due to your hell that you went through, mind you...just that it's so typical for Dell's support and prices. It's like the voices of so many customers I supported all coming together as one. I feel for you, truly - there's no way on Earth you could have anticipated the depths of how badly they suck these days.
yeah, as someone who has built a ton of machines over the years and helped family members buy custom and prebuilt machines the moment that the first support case was opened the technician should have reviewed the configuration that was purchased and then asked the customer about each component, and then instructed them to return the machine for a refund then and there. Also when a support case is opened that should automatically reset the warranty and return window, its so crazy that there were 3 tickets opened for that single machine and when the problem was finally found it could no longer be returned for what is frankly a oversight on Dell's end. How on earth do you sell a multi-thousand dollar pre-configured machine with mid to high specs with a standard mechanical drive as the boot disk.
This entire saga is just Dell failing to be a decent company at every step and its so sad that John blames himself for this failure.
My company contracts with tell and it's still the same nonsense when scheduling a tech.
As a former Dell customer myself, I can fully say I will never willingly buy a dell pc again. I went through hell with them and my laptop in 2011. I had to threaten to sue them in order for them to send a tech out, thankfully he actually fixed my laptop instead of just doing what they told him to (replace parts that had already been replaced like 5 times to no improvement). Thankfully it worked until 2018 when I finally killed it by trying to make it run filmora 9. By then I already had another laptop (a refurbished lenovo thinkpad also from 2011) and that thing is a beast. I love it. I have also learned my lesson with editing software, and have decided to never download any unless I am 1000% positive my computer will be ok. So far, that means I'm sticking with the built in video editing software.
Does Dell EMC provide the same experience? I bought a home server from them and thought the price was great, the hardware has worked perfectly, and the tiny bit of support I used was decent.
Dude's narrating this like an early 2010's creepypasta.
Agreed, made me lose my appetite
And it’s fucking golden
LMAO I was wondering what his narration reminded me of, it's 100% akin to creepypasta vids and honestly I love it
@@restfulori212 "DUDE, you're getting a Dell!" Now seems more aggressively forceful. Whether you want it or not, you're getting a Dell PC. You have no choice, and you consent means nothing, and the process is going to be excruciating.
Isn't this an early 2010's creepypasta?
SuperEyepatchWolf: Please help me…
Dell Customer Support: I’M SORRY, J O H N
Pleading doesn’t work J O H N
we are very annoyed with the fact you dared to call us, J O H N
* J O S H
@@adriatic.vineyards nope. “Im sorry john” is a reference to a prev video
AAAAAA
Used to work for Dell, and the story you're telling is one that I've heard more than once. That said, what "The Closer" told you about the treatment you got being normal is actually fairly accurate. A situation like yours would be considered a long running case, and usually if a person is having that much trouble their case will eventually get bumped up to a Resolution Manager. There's also a team that looks for support issues on Twitter and authorizes Dell employees to reach out.
So, dunno if this comment will reach you, but yea, you seriously weren't getting much more consideration than anyone else. It'd be ludicrous to think that your pull had *nothing* to do with it, but for the most part you weren't treated any differently.
Thanks for the additional info. =)
That’s good to hear
Wow, Dell really sucks in the end lol. At least now I know better than to buy from them.
Ex-Dell technician here. They've been using that exact hold song for GODDANG YEARS! I haven't worked there for over a decade and I instantly recognize that song.
When they have been using the exact same song for years, there really should be an option to just press a button and the song doesn't play, rather you get something like TV static or just like an alternative noise that's just either a constant, or just pure silence until you get someone on the line
This is the most infuriating thing I've ever watched as someone who knows PCs. It's not your fault you don't understand PCs, the ENTIRE POINT of buying a PC from places like Dell is to avoid the headache at the cost of more money for convince. Dell failed, not you.
He didn't use a credit card and utilize the power of a charge back. Any time I use a charge back, the problem is magically fixed ASAP.
People teach your children what a chargeback is.
Even if Dell's customer support was bad he still caused all the issues because of his lack of research prior to purchase. Why would he attempt to customize a PC without any knowledge of how to do so, its his fault for not looking at all the options for the parts on the website. He didn't even know he put in a HDD, how does he do that? Dell couldn't identify any issues because there were none , he got exactly what he ordered. Now, it is true that dells parts are overpriced, but Dells main customers are massive business that don't care about price, and besides that isn't the point here. What a company decides to price their products is irrelevant, when buying expensive equipment it is practically mandatory to check sources for a better deal, one does not just buy the first car they see. It is his complete lack of understanding of the product he was buying that led to this and Dell shouldn't be ostracized for his own incompetence. As someone whose job is so fundamentally tied to PC's it is baffling that he knew so little and put in so little effort into research.
You clearly are not "someone who knows PCs"
"Dell failed, not you."
He didn't do the proper research to buy a high end computer... he's the sole responsible por this hell he went through.
I work with Dell computers, I bought dozens of computers, laptops and servers, I dealt with Dell support. I know this shit...
@@rufusrupo No it's not. I've done it at least five times with different electronic products and I won every time because you have the right to utilize a chargeback if someone sells you a defective product. If that was against the terms of service my credit card company would not have given my money back. So obviously you are mistaken. Also why did you mention paypal? Credit card chargebacks have nothing to do with PayPal. I'm sorry to say but I think you are under informed about chargebacks and I think you should probably just Google "can I use a chargeback for a defective product?" You'll find that the answer is yes.
If you buy a product and it's defective, you have the right to utilize a charge back and if you use a debit card you have the right to dispute it with your bank.
As somebody who's "in the know" about computers, this whole video hurt to watch, but I think it does a very good job at illustrating the exact issues that Dell perpetuates to people who don't know much about computers, which as a prebuilt manufacturer is their target audience. It's incredibly scummy.
And it's worth noting that even people who ARE in the know-how like myself, can fall victim to their scummy tactics. They still owe me €700 for a broken laptop that they sent me, agreed to repair, then refused to repair, then refused to take back, then broke the law by not following up official orders, and now the only option I have left is to sue them. It's no coincidence that dell is so close to HELL.
@@HazewinDog wow, that's terrible, I'm sorry to hear that
@@HazewinDog you could write them a polite email telling them that this is not on, and that you don't want to have to go further, but could they please remove the problem before you tell the ombudsman?
And yet, whenever I tell some Pre-Built Pleb that my junker I built from ebay snipes and scrap cost 1/4th and is twice as powerful they will defend their prebuilt untill they phsycialy see my comp then they shut up.
It's a two way street, we can try as hard as we want to teach people but most of them just don't want to learn. Hence why console wars still go on and why Apple products still sell.
I 100% would've fallen for these issues, it's telling that most of these problems were caused by the default options being terrible. eg I would've assumed it came with WLAN, because why the fuck would it default to not having that? Do you have to dig into the menus to make sure it comes with a fucking CPU?
Something tells me that the whole "oh we went and no one was there" was the company stalling untill the refund window ran out
Why are your three scariest videos about space jam, buying a PC, and Garfield?
Because these are the scariest things in the universe.
"I look into the mirror. I no longer respect the person I see back to me."
I feel this.
some kind of silent hill reference maybe?
@@iconic410 no its not a reference, do you remember when you did something stupid then you just hate past you
@@Dash-lx4ng That's me 24/7.
I just stopped looking at all reflective surfaces years ago.
I felt so seen
I always tell people "go to dell" when I don't like them.
Don't give them any money. Even the worst people you know are better than dell, and fell is the worst company I know, and still owes me €700 for shipping a broken laptop and refusing to repair, replace or refund it.
Don't be so vulgar. Tell them instead to go to "D E double hockey sticks".
Just say "Go to deck." instead.
That's kind of evil dude...
hey! never thought i would see you here
That brief panic the final lady had when she realized that you weren't just some guy doing YT solely for fun but someone who actually has a pretty large following that is seeing all the bad PR Dell is getting from this was hilarious
I want to thank all the people who left answers and questions to forums in the last 30 years. If it wasn't for your tireless effort of helping obscure problems, I probably wouldn't have been able to play half the steam games that I have in multiplayer or even understand what a dedicated server is.
Thank you guys! Even time travelers need help. ❤️
wtf
@@disissid9060 what was that guy on about
If anything, i hope people who aren't familiar with computer learn to:
1- not to trust proprietary monoliths like dell
2-ask a friend to build a pc and pay them with a pizza
I dont have a friend laying around who can build a PC
I had to give up on my pc BECAUSE my friend built it poorly.
@@anenemystand5582 ask people on discord or ltt forums or something like that, or you could yourself become informed to make the better decision for you
@@Lucax97 get better friends
Or support local PC shops
Alternate title: average DELL buying experience
I've had a DELL PC for over a decade now. And i can tell you, this video is as accurate as it gets. Never buy DELL to anyone who reads this. Its a waste of money and effort.
We bought our first laptop direct from Dell's website a inspiring 1300. Back than in 2006 Dell was great we never had a bad experience with any part of their service, hell the laptop was rock solid. It's still around but age and mileage have taken there toll on it sadly
I bought my first machine from dell, I still have ptsd from calling customer services again and again
DELL is simply just a brand selling pre-built PC. There is nothing wrong with "DELL" PCs. Because there isn't one, practically.
To be clear, everything inside a PC, regardless of brands, are built of very standardized parts. Think of a bike. People often see a bike, they see the brand and associate everything of that bike to that brand. Nothing can be further from the truth.
The saddle, the handle bar, the brakes, the gears, even the freaking lights....are all 3rd party standardized parts. When you buy a "branded" bike. You're buying a PRE-BUILT bike. Just as when you buy a branded PC, you're buying a PRE-BUILT PC.
Still confused? DELL basically assembled a computer and slapped their logo and price on it. Nothing in there is DELL.
@@Kyle-kc8cw I don't think you understand either
If it's so easy to build a PC just like theirs why is the performance subpar? Why does the cooling not work at all?
If all they do is just slap it together *why is their customer service so freaking atrocious*?
The fact his PC returned to him after everything is terrifying
I was really wondering about that as he put it in the box lol. I thought “did he seriously record all of this footage while he was in the middle of that mess??”
Even Dell didn't want their piece of crap back 😂
“I AM BACK FATHER!”
This is a huge testament to your talent at making the ordinary creepy. Great work!
I mean, yes. On the one hand, it was you who didn't know any better, didn't have the core knowledge to order a PC with confidence, and that got you into trouble.
But on the other, much more serious hand, these kinds of companies *prey* on people like that. They wager that people won't know what they're doing, that they can send them sub-par machinery, and hope that there's too many hoops to jump through and that you'll settle for mediocrity or worse.
I find this to be much more one of those cautionary tales: that the systems put in place by companies to mentally wear you down to the point of acceptance of whatever product they give you once you hand them your money have just become commonplace, that your situation is not unique, and that the resolution you got from this situation is actually quite rare.
I was going to say exactly that. It's one thing to admit that you maybe shouldn't order a computer without really knowing what part does what. It is another to actually send a computer (a 2600€ one at that) without mentioning during the selection of parts that "If you don't have a PCIe wifi card, you won't be able to connect to the Internet". It's called User Experience.
I mean, I bought my first PC to build on my own 8 years ago, and even then the website I bought it from actually could cross-reference parts to tell me when they were not compatible and had red alert at the end when my order didn't include a wifi card.
It's 2021, your consumer is going to buy a PC without an SSD or the possibility to connect to the Internet, just tell them it's not super wise to do so!
Interestingly this is how the welfare system works as well. And whatever your views are on welfare, the fact that someone who lives alone and may have several debilitating disabilities having to go through arduous tasks of jumping through hoops and getting the right language just so they don't starve to death is evil.
On top of that, computer companies can also just straight up lie to you and face no consequences. I got an HP laptop last year that was fucked up from the moment I got it, the screen would go black at completely random intervals, the screen would load back up and would sometimes have incorrect colors that would only get fixed on a full reboot, I was experiencing strange frame drops (which are still present to this day) and finally the hard drive that it was booting from broke less than 6 months after I bought this computer. This computer was listed as new, but these problems only make sense if it was refurbished and using already worn down components. I ended up getting my hard drive replaced with a new SSD and thankfully kept all of my data, with the only problem being my epic games installation directory got confused
@@omegaPhix Yes, but that *needs* to be told. At least a warning at the checkout stage, preferably earlier, saying "You don't have a Wi-Fi card. You will only be able to connect with an ethernet cable" or something.
@@sponge1234ify
Why tho? I don't know anyone who connects his desktop PC via Wifi and that's just friends & family, not a professional environment.
That there's no wifi built into the PC is not hidden or something on dells website.
When the SSD doesn't work: "I bet he didn't plug in the power cable". When the power cable is plugged in and the SSD still doesn't work: "oh no"
Funnily enough, I had that exact problem when I first got an SSD, same one even. I was able to resolve it by running the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool (normally used for RAM), after that the device was recognized.
As I have no idea how Dell's bios works do I wounder if it would have appeared in Windows Disk Manager and if the Bios would have found it if ether
A: The current boot drive was disconnected
B: it had a Bootloader on it.
"Did you plug in the power cable?"
"..it's an M.2 drive..."
@@rynobehnke8289 c: its only in power cable and not in the mobo
@@jktech2117 Okay yes SEW did make enough minor mistakes that I can totally see him only connecting the Sata plug to 1 end of the SSD but not the motherboard.
I was mostly not suggesting it because I would have hoped that his discord helpers would have pointed it out and because I did see OEM bios that will try everything to not boot from a new hard drive for as long as the original one still has a boot-loader.
The God that whispers "no" gives me chills everytime. Its stupid that something like this was written for a customer service hell, which everyone goes through eventually
Honestly I really appreciate the act of applying cosmic significance to issues that are relatively mundane, it helps me get through my own stuff and makes me feel more empowered to take care of myself lol
Imagine having such a terrible buying experience that journalists literally write articles about it.
Linus Tech Tips and Gamers Nexus have done videos about buying prebuilts. They're almost always fucking GARBAGE
Imagine being famous so that journalists write articles about your terrible buying experience instead of leaving you to rot in hell alongside all of the others who had the same terrible buying experience as you but don't have the same following
@@slamdangles I have a prebuilt and its certainly not garbage, but its also not a dell
@@spleeneater9481 what you paid vs what you got, it's gonna be garbage.
@@slamdangles in case you haven’t noticed we’re in a serious gpu shortage. So anyone who wants a gpu in a reasonable amount of time for anything other than gaming, is probably going to pay the scalpers or buy a prebuilt.
This guy bought a PC with a Xeon W-2223 and a Quadro p1000, with no built in WiFi and no Solid state drives, for thousands... Even a 1st gen Ryzen 5 outperforms that CPU at virtually EVERYTHING, and the "Quadro" naming scheme in those P models is extremely misleading because their lower end cards such as the 1000 are only good at driving displays, even the p4000 struggled with rendering performance when it was new (it's been obsolete for a few years already).
They royally scammed you and sold you a PC outdated by 2014-2015 standards, in 2020. The PC wasn't slow because of a HDD, it was slow because it was literally garbage down to the CPU and GPU and the old PC was probably beefier despite being older. HOLY F*CK, Typical Dell... The resolutions employee probably was offering the refund to shut you up and stop the more tech savvy twitter readers from figuring out what you had spec-wise, creating a bigger PR nightmare.
Yes. You’ve just summarised the point of the video.
@@adamg.manning6088 Oh really? At what point of the video did he point out he had a Xeon W-2223 and a Quadro p1000, then compared it with Ryzen 5 performance, then established a timeframe at which this computer would have been viable from a tech savvy perspective? Because that's what the comment is about and I can't find that anywhere in the video. Please illustrate me, fellow smart*ss commenter...
@@maxconnery6353 I bet you’re fun at parties….
@@maxconnery6353 kek
@@adamg.manning6088 Yes I am!
But given such a generic and unoriginal comeback attempt I can guarantee that you, in fact, aren't fun at parties. :D
"I just wanted to be sad on the internet" Most relatable thing I've ever heard
I just recently finished building my 1st PC and it was this video that inspired me to do so. Thanks to you, I did as much research as possible rather than replacing my old Dell laptop with another one or a Dell desktop. It was actually fun to read up on parts, plan my build, and finally put everything together.
Thank you for making this video and sharing your experience. I'm glad I put together my own PC myself and learned from your mistakes.
When the process of fixing the PC should be over but there are 20 minutes left in the video:
Good on you! You are now independent from big corporations, and actually know how the damn thing works.
And you know how to upgrade individual components. ;)
ACTUAL morals of the story:
1. When buying a PC, do general research to find out what companies you should avoid,
2. PCs are usually (depending on the circumstance) best built by experts who you have direct contact with,
3. If you buy prebuilt and it doesn't work/do what you want right out of the box, return it immediately.
this needs more upvotes
That last one is super important advice if you don't know a thing about computers and you buy prebuilt
Also Ethernet exists?
I would say do "specific" research. The poweredge workstation series from Dell is really excellent, but they're intended for enterprise users who need a lot of flexibility to customize to their needs. They're usually setting up many of these at a time and don't mind making changes to BIOS, dealing with drivers issues, RAID setup, and paying corporate level prices for components and support.
The Dell website does it's best to steer household folks away from these machines so it's not their fault. I think Mr Wolf could have got his power edge configured nicely if he had hired someone to just figure it out.
@@Hai43561 Yes but it is a 3K euro PC, you expect it to be top of the line with a bunch of bell and wistle.
Not sure what's worse:
Ordering a $2400 PC with almost no specs, or the fact that Dell would have the audacity to sell a PC with almost no specs for $2400.
How does someone spend $2400 on something they have no idea of?
@@gaemer3967 rich youtubers
@@gaemer3967 most people would assume that a pc that expensive would have all the basics.......
That was in *EURO, don't forget. It was more like 3000+
Honestly he sorta did this to hinself by not just building his own
Edited because I am a jackass with broken ears
@@matturner6890 he literally says euros?
The Dell representative who is great at customer service somehow brings me the most joy. Like, Dell is clearly in the wrong - but she did her job really well and managed your feelings really smoothly.
This video actually helped me get out of a mental hole, along with some other influences from the media and people around me. It sounds super dumb. A guy struggling with a laptop company saving me from a terrible point of my life. But it's true. The final, closing remarks hit me like a truck in a way it didn't when I first watched this video a year or so ago. I was at a point where I needed help, and those words helped push me to get it.
So thanks, man. This video was a contributor to putting me back into happier, healthier times. I'm coming back to comment this after I started getting better, because I just felt like doing so
Love the content, will always love it.
Dell: We'll send a repairman.
SEW: When?
Dell: We won't tell you. He comes and goes as he pleases.
Foolish Mortal. The Dell Repairman is eternal, he is beyond our understanding.
we do not control the repairman
he's in your house now :) turn around and you'll see him :)
he is omnipresent and omniscient, he was always there.
Ah, he waited a whole 3 microseconds at the door for you, he's already 7 parallel universes away now
90's: "Dude! You're getting a Dell!"
Now: "Dude.. you got a Dell?"
I had a nightmare experience with HP once. My laptop burnt through 3 motherboards. Best Buy told me they wouldn't repair it anymore, it was HP's problem. Sent it to them.
It took them TWO YEARS to send it back. Best Buy gave me a new laptop because of it. That one was great for those two years, then my old one arrived like an unwanted boomerang.
Edit: I never bought another HP
Having a few years of experience in technical support for IT companies... this feels so real. The feeling of knowing fully well that you cannot *actually* help someone who is desperate to just move on with their lives... let's just say I understand the concept of alienation a lot better now.
as someone who's had a *fun* time with dell, that "we sent the repairman but no one was home" thing was DEFINITELY them just stalling until the refund window had closed. to anyone buying a prebuilt (do not recommend but anyways), if it doesn't do what it's supposed to out of the box, get the refund immediately, its just not worth the effort
It's funny how they still try that when it's almost guaranteed that someone is home, considering the quarantine. So slimy.
As someone who worked IT consumer support and interacted with a lot consumer IT support systems, I have to disagree. Big company’s don’t care enough about individual customers to rip them off with elaborate schemes. Nor do they care enough about individual customers to fix broken support chains that look like elaborate schemes. Bit of a distinction without a difference to the customer. In the end, they don’t care unless it may become a PR thing. Hence, The Closer.
What would you suggest as the best option to go with?
As someone who used to work for Dell, albeit in a higher tier of warranty than his Basic coverage, this is 100% false. As long as you call/chat within the refund/return time frame, it'll be honored. Even if Dell spends the next year trying to repair it.
Dell contracts out with third parties to do service calls. Certainly when I worked there those third parties were always over-booked and hard to communicate with, the best you could really do was leave a note and hope it'd get read. What he really *should* have done was make their failure to show up Dell's problem, not his, threaten to send the machine back - don't just keep passively waiting.
This video is sponsored by Dell, get your new state of the art PC today!
now he can do the cypher
@@JDPrado ikr?
Love your videos keep it up
lol
Love your videos and podcast !
I feel bad cuz I have a background in IT and knowing what is likely wrong, and watching someone who doesn’t know suffer through this is tough.
Same, this video makes me realize why people think us IT guys are just these crazy tech wizards....
This is what I love about this guy, his ability to take a topic as mundane as buying a computer and making it feel like he's taking you on a grand journey lmao
The lesson : when a device doesnt work after 3 days after receiving it and have already tried to trouble shoot it, always ask for a refund. No european or north american company can deny to provide a refund if its in the refund widow period. - ex customer service employee.
Personally, I'm surprised how he missed the 14 day return window or does Ireland play by different rules than the EU?
@@Rahhelthethird he had to wait 3 weeks for a tech, I would've pushed back on them telling me I missed the window because of that
@@carebear3120 Indeed, that is a legit reason. But how did he let the technician go before the issue was fixed? I would've done a test boot in front of the guy and tried rendering before trusting that he fixed anything. Super would've probably been told by that guy it's due to the HDD by then.
@@Rahhelthethird Ireland is part of the EU.
This is excellent advice.
"I am nearing the end of my journey"
-looks at time-
-we're only halfway through the video-
"Oh no,"
The amount of times I went "oh no" while watching this video- （┬┬＿┬┬）
i legit looked at the time and when i saw "12 minutes out of 35" i nearly screamed wtf. what is even life
I bought a Dell laptop when I was going back to college because the college gave some weird vague requirements and it seemed at the time to be the only one that would work for me in short notice. It was the most expensive laptop I ever bought and it was nothing but problems from the start, beginning with the fan breaking in the FIRST YEAR so the thing sounded like a jet engine even after they "fixed" it, through when the hard drive failed in the middle of second year, and died completely before the end of third year first semester. Never again.
NEVER
AGAIN
Gotta give this man credit for his perseverance
"BUT THEY ARE NO LONGER IN BUSINESS DUE TO BREXIT" punched me in the gut
moral of the story: Don't buy Dell and double check everything you order online.
Also: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
also: be educated about the things youre buying
Quadruple check*
To be honest, Dell laptops are pretty decent but if you are getting a gaming/editing PC, just don’t. Don’t buy Dell and don’t buy prebuilts. Build a custom computer and if you can’t figure out how to build it there are guides on YT and subreddits to help you, it’s very scary but actually very easy.
No, the moral he came up with is much better. Don't be afraid to ask for help going into a big purchase. Double checking everything you order online is important too though.
This could have been solved so many ways. Asking for help from the start, buying a NOT customized pre-built machine, As soon as it not working as expecting calling Dell and asking why might this be, explaining it's slower than your old machine. This might have lead even one of their crappy phone technicians to look over the build, which could have lead to noticing the lack of an SSD, or even other problems that may have been relevant to his build.
I think the same thing would have been just as likely to happen with any other big manufacturer (I'm thinking HP or Lenovo or... is that it for big monolithic computer companies now days?) That said Dell is still the worst from my own personal experiences, because they do strange things for no apparent reason, like... Potentially shut down additional SATA ports in the bios, have backwards motherboards for no apparent reason, use GOBS of unstandardized bullshit that makes upgrade paths hell. My FAVORATE example of DELL bullshit is on old OptiPlex gx150 (or similar looking model). If you look up OptiPlex gx150, you can see how it looks, the writing on the side, one of the "L" in DELL is removeable. Why I don't know but it was, and not like left a hole that might be used for something removeable, it just left a recessed L shaped hole. That wasn't even the only thing strange about it though. It's design is clamshell, it's motherboard was backwards, it's got funky proprietary BS for the front IO connections, it's got a button that disallows the machine to turn on if the case is open. ALL of these things for no apparent reason, many of them likely only increasing the cost of manufacture.
I actually loved this. I got frustrated at you when you realised that you missed the drop down boxes. Then realised how hard it is to enter the PC market without prior knowledge of parts and compatibility. Really made me feel for people who don't have the know how to build their own PC and have to deal with pre-built companies.
unironically my favorite video from you. i love hearing about your in depth descriptions of media, and your analyzations of people and fictional works and how they intertwine and stuff like that, but this is just funny and i love it. same with the space jam 2 video as well but this one just hits differently to me.
the dell lady literally had a death note psychological anime battle with eyepatchwolf lmao
I can certainly see her as a villainess that "makes problems go away"... just in a monkey's paw kind of way.
This is litterally something lovecraft would write. He wrote a story of how he was terrified of air conditioners
HP had xenophobic but was dumb as shit and everything is unknown to him
@@quaelgeist3337 and you never learned how to speak English. At least he knows grammar lmao
@@quaelgeist3337 And yeah, being racist really matters in stories where nothing matters and the world is gonna end. Racism=worse than all of humanity going extinct
@@quaelgeist3337 fuck Lovecraft but that doesn't matter at all
@@quaelgeist3337 cringe, girl
Wow, this resonates with me a lot. Back when I got my first developer job, my first big purchase was a bunch of PC parts, as I thought that surely I, a technical person, could do the research and figure out how to put them all together. When they all finally arrived, I sat down and spent the next…4 days trying to build it. First it was the unusual layout of the case I got making it difficult to install the power supply, then it was not having a long enough screwdriver to easily install the cooler I got, then it was realizing I had ordered a separate cpu air cooler instead of case fans, so I had to spend more money getting those, and felt obligated to install that because it was obviously better than the stock air cooler that came with my AMD 3600. Que me dropping the CPU as I take the stock cooler out because the thermal paste stuck to it and having a mini heart attack.
I ordered three separate WiFi cards because the first one didn’t work, and the second one felt really slow, and when I finally got everything installed properly, I clicked the power button and…nothing. The fans spun a bit, that’s all. I desperately searched for solutions online, even posting twice in r/buildapc, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, after a literal day of searching, I realized I hadn’t plugged in both parts of the power supply’s 24 pin power cable. Why that cable is split into two parts is still a mystery to me to this day.
After that, I struggled with keyboard recognition and, fittingly, hard drive detection. I had gotten a m.2 drive(that runs on SATA protocols and thus loses most of the benefits that M.2 NVME drives offer) and it worked fine, but it was supposed to only be a boot drive, so it was just 500gb. My 2tb hard disk…laid bolted into my pc for a year and a half, undetected by my BIOS, until one day recently I decided to simply…unplug the SATA cable and plug it back in. And it works now.
After everything was in a workable state, I continued reading about building a pc, because I wanted to continuously upgrade my machine. I realized I had made horrible decisions regarding the model of my power supply, case, and motherboard, AND I had somehow purchased the WRONG GPU by accident.
I experienced that cold spike of dread. That feeling that I was in way over my head, cracking my being against the enormity that was a complicated machine. Even worse was the fact that I got my degree in Computer Science, and work in the software industry. Was I faking everything? Was I really so incompetent?
Ultimately, the thing that kept me sane throughout that ordeal, was the mindset I had cultivated. It wasn’t a tool to make my life easier, it was a project, something for me to learn from, and invest myself into. A week or two after the computer booted, I ordered a little custom sticker that reads “The Meteor Mk I”, to represent how it was going to end my old PC, a dinosaur from Dell that had been mine for 8 years. I don’t know why I felt compelled to share this story, but there it is.
This video perfectly explains my experience with cars through 2023. Every feeling you touched upon has been something I've experienced. The dread of having something overhead without a thing you can do, failure after failure, money hole after money hole, feeling scammed. Idk this video made me tear up at work. Been through 3 cars in 2023 and currently have my car in the shop, I hope this is it, but I'm not too hopeful...
As someone who did a LOT of wrong things bulding his first PC, this video triggers a primal fear in me
being an enthusiast I find this video extremely relatable to when i was a beginner, having no idea what the hell is going on with anything
Rough way to learn a lesson. Basic PC stuff is a good life skill and potential hobby. Never buy a PC from Dell again. Also, I think you meant descent, not decent
I only recently built my first PC, and I spent literal days researching parts, asking friends that knew about this stuff, and looking over like a dozen different build guides just to be as safe as possible and not screw anything up.
It's been a month and most of the stuff works fine. Still can't get the RGB to work at all and Corsair's customer service has been basically useless about it. I still have no idea if I've somehow fucked something up or if there's something wrong with the RGB hub or fans included with the case. The fact that I still don't know if I've fucked up or not is not a pleasant feeling at all. At least it's a minor issue and all the necessary hardware works fine but it's still frustrating.
Edit: Oh and I also knocked out the power cable for the GPU while trying to fix the RGB issue, and it took me 2 hours and a customer service request with Fractal Design to fix it. They were pretty helpful. So I definitely know I'm capable of making dumb mistakes still. Which makes the RGB thing even more frustrating because I know it could be my fault, but I don't know for sure IF it is my fault.
My first pc went to shit, it was a mistake but at least it was a cheap mistake since I didn't really have much money (still don't)
It's funny, I thought i did crappy research (about 2 months worth)
But my pc turned out great😂
Shoutout to my boy LinusTechTips
Let this man's suffering teach anyone thinking of getting a new PC a lesson: Put out a message that you're thinking of buying a Dell, and wait for anyone who'd ever consider themselves your friend to rush in at warp speed to please god try and help you out.
honestly that should apply to anything that your going to spend real money on. if you know guys who know tech, use that. if you dont, ask the internet.
god knows ive ended up as the goto guy in my group for questions about hardware and to my great disdain, monitors.
Or just make sure you understand how dells site works before you purchase anything. He made the mistake of getting a pc with hdd but everything after was just bad mistakes
@@quantum5661 yup, my brother is that guy for me and I'm so grateful for him. he built my pc, he's the one I go to when there's an issue with it and I consult him before I buy any piece of technology
so yeah appreciate the tech person in your life and let them know you appreciate them
My girlfriend was 🤏 this close to buying a Dell pc, but minutes before she puts a purchase through, I screamed and redirected her to actual computer parts.
Or put out that you are going to buy a prebuilt and then have someone you know swoop in to make a part list and lead you through building it. The best thing you can do for yourself to save money and upgrade in the future is to build it since you will understand better where everything is when upgrading and you save money.
Amazon does the "we tried to deliver but no one was home!" and it's for some reason evolved into a signature required package and you can track it down if you're lucky but you're ending up having to physically pick it up from somewhere
I thought this was going to be a storytime video, but little did I know it would turn into a series of existential dread of watching the past nine years of my life play out before me.
The increasing desperation to find a way out, crawling through the dark hoping to answers, knocking on every door you can reach only to have them slammed in your face, slowly losing hope that you'll ever be free as time draws on in its indifferent march...
It was not a PC that brought me here, but I still cannot get out
“And the real nightmare begins”
- looks to see how much time is left…..
“Damn…”
dude. this is me exactly right now. at the 12 minute mark :D
@@eph51912 surely can’t get worse than this!?
Happened to me several times throughout this video.
My advice: ALWAYS ask your pc geek friend when buying.
yep, cuz we've already had our days in corporate hell, and dont want others to listen to tha damned waiting music
HAHAHAH!!! SO TRUE!
or the internet. im pretty sure asking fucking 4chan will get you better answers than corporates faq pages
More importantly, don't buy "professional" devices as an enthusiast. Dude could have bought an XPS tower for 2/3rd of the price and would have had something working really well out of the box. Talk to the pre-sales guys, not the after sales.
@@4nto418 When I read that the CPU was a Xeon I cringed. That's why you should never buy with just the price in mind.
This is giving me flashbacks to when I was trying to troubleshoot issues with my first ever drawing pen tablet. By all accounts, it had lived twice its life expectancy and had outlived several laptops. However, I was determined to keep using it until its last breath. After several days of reading and watching stuff online about the tablet, the drawing software, my own computer, and tinkering with all sorts of settings and ethereal electronic wizardry, I finally called customer support of the tablet company and the guy walked me through exactly all the things I had already tried prior. The verdict was “Idk, that’s all I got, sorry.” The tablet still sits in my storage as a sentimental item. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to accept the situation and move on. Don’t work yourself up in a frenzy and become a victim to the sunk cost fallacy. You do what you reasonably can and if it doesn’t work out, oh well. Better luck with something else!
I hate to downplay the pain and suffering you went through to get your PC, but this genuinely might be the best video you’ve ever made 😅. The story had so many twists and turns that were so perfectly accentuated by your dramatic narration and the visuals. I laughed, I cried, I felt genuine suspense. So if there’s any solace to your suffering, you have an excellent video and you serve as a cautionary tale for people getting into PC’s
So you're really going against the time honored tradition of "Dude, you're getting a Dell"?
Oh wow, hugbees! Love your streams, man
Did that dude die?
I'm glad to see the big hitters from another side of UA-cam are recognizing eyepatch wolf I've loved this guy since his sbfp appearance
Dude, you're going to Hell?
How are Dells made tho? 👀
As a tech support loser, I find it mental that the first agent who connected to your machine, ran diagnostics, while likely having your order specs on their screen, failed to clock the fact that you were using Standard Hard drives, and could have solved the issue there and then by offering to upgrade you for the cost of the parts.
It's because they're not going to know what "it's slow" means because it's such a vague thing to say. Slow compared to what? The PC was running perfectly, it was running as intended, it was as fast as those components put together in that way can be. So many people who don't know a lot about PC's complain that their PC is slow, but that doesn't give you any information, so it's useless. They might be used to very very fast PCs from where they work, for example, and don't realise that their work uses much more powerful machines than they can afford to use at home themselves. The repair man doesn't know that.
And the repair man will have multiple jobs to do every day. They're sent there with a very specific task to do, they don't have the luxury of being able to do a several hours long troubleshooting session on each and every computer, they don't have the time in the day. That's why companies like Dell have customer service phone lines in the first place, all the troubleshooting is done beforehand, in advance of the repair guy even going to the house. They have a list of things they need to do at that address. And they're probably not even allowed to go outside of that brief, even if they know what's actually wrong. They'd have to ask permission first, otherwise something could get messed up and the customer might try to sue Dell in small claims court or something. So the repair man doesn't wanna risk getting fired, they just do what they're told, no more, no less.
And again even if they did decide to break the rules, there's no way to tell what's wrong. Because again the PC was working perfectly, as intended. It's just that Wolf didn't realise that. That's why no problems could be found on any troubleshooting session, because it was working perfectly, at full speed. There's no way to fix that, except for buying new and better components.
At least Wolf now knows what not to do. He'll probably learn how to build a PC himself now. Because that's a lot less time consuming than going through this whole process that he did. It's not difficult to learn how to build a PC, even young kids can do it. But people who aren't tech savvy think it takes years to learn how to do it and want the simplicity of buying a pre-built one. But yeah, buying a pre-built one is actually more complicated than building your own, as Wolf found out. And hopefully this video will convince others to learn how to build their own. It really is quite simple. And you don't have to even do it yourself, you can buy the components and pay a computer shop to put the pieces together for you, if you're afraid of messing things up by installing them wrong. Overall, even with that added cost of paying them to put it together for you, it'll be probably at least a half if not a third of the price of a pre-built one with the same specs.
@@duffman18 You're right. So you ask - in what way is it slow? Oh, on boot-up? How long does that take? That sounds normal for an HDD. Oh, you wanted SSD?
@@otocan Its like bringing your Nissan Leaf to the mechanics and asking the guy why is the car slow.
@@weeksweeks9552 Exactly! And then the mechanic starting going on about how it could be the engine, or the pistons, or the oil pressure, or the fuel injection, or the transmission, or the ......
@@RockingStar1011 If a Nissan Leaf has issues with fuel injectors, pistons, or oil pressure then I’d have a LOT of questions. Most pressing would be why are there pistons and fuel injectors in my electric car?
My mom had a Dell laptop that we couldn't figure out the problem with. From the day we bought it, it took 5 minutes to boot, and browsing through chrome was slower than cooking a few hotpockets in the microwave. She was not able to do personal stuff involving downloading software on her work laptop so needed something new but didn't want to spend a lot of money. She was nervous to ask so I offered my help. I had built my own PC and while I did not pick the parts out for it, I had done a lot of PC building sim and felt confident. I managed to pick a build with an M.2 and a nice AMD cpu that had integrated graphics so that we could have both a fast and below $500 PC. I built it in a night and she has loved it since.
She is also an English masters so I ask her to help me with my cover letters and resume for job applications or for essays. Sometimes asking for help is just your best option.
SEW: I need help.
Dell: Sure, just look down here
SEW: Okay 👁
Dell:🖕
"Journalists wrote articles about it." I'm torn between laughing, crying, feeling nothing and all at the same time.
It's pure madness
Wait those aren’t real thou.
In my younger days, I used to research ALL my purchases for literal weeks before committing to buying something, to make sure I've avoided any possible mistakes. It was exhausting, and eventually I felt like a fool for doing it.
This video is making me re-asses my situation.
Weeks is a long time. It took me 3-4 days of research for buying all I needed for my PC last summer. Nowadays it's so easy to get information because everyone makes a youtube video or forum post about whatever you need.
For a purchase that big with a 2300€ prize tag you sure as hell aren't wrong when you research everything for a bit longer.
This is a serious amount of money for most people, it certainly is for me.
I spent nearly a year comparison shopping for my used pick up truck. Absolute tank, all the features I want, price I can afford.
Worth it.
Took me a month of research before buying my PC. I didn't realise how much I liked tech stuff and since then I never lost touch with the field. It still takes me weeks to commit before buying any tech because the fun is in agonising over the large number of options and never being quite satisfied and then eventually going for the best budget option. At least if I fuck up, it won't be a huge loss 😅.
I did this with a printer I bought for my girlfriend and I think it was a great decision. Printers are notoriously pretty awful, but the one I got works pretty well, has great quality for an inkjet, and hasn't broken yet in well over a year of moderate use.
The way you can perfectly capture and express the existential dread of having an expensive piece of equipment fail with no reason and seemingly no hope of fixing it after you're too far in to pull away but too scared to keep going is truly amazing.
This sounds like a tale straight from the deepest pits of the seventh hell, I'm only halfway through and praying you have a happy ending. That being said, you have a knack for making your suffering incredibly entertaining, and you've inspired a strrange mix of both comedy and tragedy in this video.
"We don't give this to you as some special treatment"
Cuts to all the agonizing hours of John struggling to talk with customer service as a non-youtuber, and back to the closer mentioning how he talked up a storm on twitter
*Press X to doubt*
probably just wanted to stop the bad press before it gets blown out of proportion. I remember a mrwhosetheboss vid about phone customer services its the same hell if your not famous alot of the same things happen here. big companies dont give a shit if u dont make a loud enough uproar.
Indeed, if this was just a random person the "closer" would have never called...
You *can* get a Closer without a platform. But you have to make a real nuisance of yourself. Closers usually deal with Karens & Kevins. The Closer calling him out of the blue was only because the thread was noticed by the social media PR people. Notice the UA-cam sub count gave her pause? She didn’t even realize how big his audience really was since she was probably just given a link to the twitter thread.
Which makes me wonder, how did they figure out the twitter thread tied back to his specific purchase? Someone probably had to comb through sales data to find it. He probably would have gotten the call sooner if it’s been easier to match the tweets to his account.
@@phillipelenor7831 It begs the question of why the people who called in the Closer didn't brief her properly, if you saw the Twitter thread, you'd find the youtube. If I were paranoid, I'd say someone deliberately left that information out in a business Uriah gambit.
Shenmue 3: "I gave Eyepatch a horrible experience!"
Dell: "That's cute..."
I know you probably got a million tips for the future, but as someone who is not too savvy with hardware myself: I found a little local store where I can pick and choose my parts and just get advice from the clerk. He asks all the right questions (What do you need it for? Ah, gaming, okay, what kinds of games do you primarily play? etc), then gives me options, the guy puts the pieces together for a small fee and so I know I get a working machine, put together by a pro, that has the strengths I want. If you can, find something like that and if you notice they just want to upsell you shit, go to the next store until you find the right one.
This video is a comfort video at this point. I dont know how to explain it but this video feels like what anxiety actually feels like. I feel very seen.
After working six months in customer support, I understood two things:
* This job is for the coldest, most detached of individuals
* There's a reason they love -hunting- hiring people fresh from high school
This. This is true.
can i ask why they prefer fresh hs grads?
@@insideidentity
Because high school grads don't know better.
@@MirthMouser I was once one of these young grads, I regret so much this work that pretty much destroyed any interest I would ever have in getting a carrier in our job market.
It's times like this I remember how truly lucky I am to have a friend that builds custom PCs for a living and I can just give him a budget and off he goes
That sounds awesome
My brother builds and repairs computers all day, he’s a real life saver
I wish I had people IRL who are interested in that.
Instead I help people online and don't get anything for my effort. Not that I mind, but i would love to make it a job.
i have friends i met on ffxiv that are heavily into pcs so if i have any questions then theyre able to answer
Komi San is boring af
This was a really impactful video, and resonated deeply with me. I have been battling with my medical aid to pay a portion of the cost of an IUD for years now, and the experience has been uncannily similar to your Dell hell. Endless wait times. Being passed from department to department, only to be told the original department has to handle it, or being unable to contact the department that can supposedly help. Rejected claim after rejected claim, each with a different reason, then reverting to old reasons even after those reasons have been established as being invalid. Promises that the IUD will be delivered on Monday, only for it - of course - to be rejected again, even after the representative said everything was in order. I have spent more money on the phone calls than the medical aid will actually cover, but at this point it's a matter of principle.
I made the same mistake during the pandemic as well, buying a $600 second hand pc. Couldnt get it to connect to any of my monitors. It spent months sitting in my closet. My cousin found out about it & asked to see it. He mentioned something about unhooking & re-attatching the ram cards. I still dont know how or why, but my problem with my monitor has since dissolved, & the pc experience is phenomenal.
Sometimes PC components can come a little loose during shipping, so unplugging and replugging components to make sure everything is seated properly often solves the issue.
"Mechanical drives are outdated, only used for storage, but never as boot drives"
*looks at his loyal 7 year old tin can of a PC with no SSD*
There, there buddy, he didn't mean it, you're still a champ
_My own old asf laptop recently bit the bullet, and by the time I wanted to transfer everything it crashed and never turned back on. I miss you Bloo. 🤘😔_
If it works, it works. Doesn't mean something else can't work better, but if it's good enough? Then it's good enough. We don't disparage the P-51 Mustang for not preforming like an F-15, or a collage athlete for not matching an Olympic candidate. All things in their scale my friend.
I know man. Almost made me cry. How could he say something so hurtful to my budget 2015 pc?
For the love of the value of time, and your pc... buy it an SSD as an 8th birthday present. It's the most transformative thing you can do.
Not sure if its the cause for my Hp stream but It is around 8 years old at this point, can;t download anything and the memory forces me to restart quite often but its supported me this long and for that it deserves the world, not sure when it'll leave me but hopefully it's a long way away
I have worked in a call center, and I knew a Closer. Not THE Closer, mind, but someone with the same role in customer service. The last line of defence. The one who Fixes It. The Escalation Department's Escalation Department.
She knew policy inside and out. She knew all of the major clients by name. More impressively, they knew *her* by name, and would often request her immediately upon calling in (she refused these usually. Said it was unprofessional).
I genuinely respected her a lot. She had more compassion and more confidence in her little finger than I do in my entire body. We worked at an airline together during the pandemic, and she worked overtime the whole time. I burnt out after 10 months. She still work there as far as I know.
She is made of steel
I knew the lady who worked for a huge train company that operates in and out of London. Her job was the same.. The Escalator's Escalator.
Probably like the lady you knew, must have earned her wages 3 times over. She would regularly say to the first line of contact who may have made an error "that person could have gone to the ombudsman and sued us for at least £16k.. Probably more".
These people need to leave their jobs for higher-paying ones. People: mega corporations do NOT care about you or value you, even if you are the most competent person in your entire department like these workers. Even if you are the person of last resort. Even if you are working overtime during a pandemic. They do not value you. They do not care.
@@Leroset They depend on women and men like her. Workaholics that just zip it and work, and are damn good at their job.
It's sad because they have more than just potential to be something more, and yet just relegate themselves to those positions. Probably because it scratches that work itch they have, I don't recommend being a workaholic (as if it's a choice). It's a downward spiral that you will never notice or get yourself out of
Yeah, this kinda happens in bureaucracies. They're so inflexible and obtuse and often authority is delegated to a level that has no ability to be contacted by people who actually need to do whatever needs to be done and the disconnect deadlocks everything.
So they make a few people into basically bureaucratic superheroes or secret agents; they know what to do, who to talk to, and have the authorization to just fix whatever. They make these people irreplaceable, because odds were they already nearly were, and turn them loose.
It saves the time and effort of making the existing systems actually better by creating a fixer outside the system but of it.
There's a video by CS ghost animation that covers everything about buying a computer in amazing detail! it's about 9 minutes and it's the best resource I've ever found on the subject. I can't recommend it enough!
Casdicarus would feel your pain. He went through the exact same thing. He even had the same issue with brexit when he was trying to get a fan.
This sounds like an anime antagonist's backstory on why they want to take over the universe.
Believe me computer troubles similar to this nearly made me want to be an anime antagonist, to destroy every hardware company in existent, Nvidia would be first...
It especially felt that way when we hit the "If I can just start it all again, I'd make better decisions" section.
I'm damn near impressed that you managed to avoid basically every PC buying or building resource that will practically go out of it's way to say "Do not buy a Dell, do not get involved with them, Do not even speak it's name."
When did this become the case?
@@Seth9809 for at least 20 years i think
@@amandagarcia2848 why though? Obviously I only know the basics of PC stuff, so I’m curious why
It used to be that you were just paying extra for the brand name.
My wife’s old laptop (Dell) randomly dies for zero reason. It’s three years old.
@@Seth9809 I remember Dell being shit even back in the early 2000's. My dad bought a PC from them back around 2004 or so and they ended up having to give him pretty much a better PC than what he paid for because it was nonfunctional in weeks. Started with the dual-tray disc burner just not working, but ended up with the video card and RAM burning out.
I think this is genuinely his best video, always come back to listen to this when I need to feel something
Unironically one of your best videos even to this day. The absolute rollercoaster you went through is conveyed near perfectly. The dread translates into schadenfreude immaculately. It's just such a perfect story, and despite its hilarity it's also wildly average and could happen to me if I buy a new PC in the future. Enlightening leaps in written horror. Entirely mundane, but in its mundanity it hits a portion of the soul dead center.
"I look into the mirror. I no longer respect the person staring back at me." You get used to it.
Haaaa
classic line from "Monk" :
"How do you live with yourself ?"
Allow me to stop you right in the beginning. You not knowing that much about PC's is not your fault. Dell's primary goal should be to sell you a PC that will meet your wants and needs, in an informative and helpful manner. If you were the type to know all about the inner workings of a PC, you wouldn't need a third party. Any poor experience, or lack of transparency, or whatever is solely reflective of the company, its training and hiring practices, and its sales systems. Just throwing that out there.
To be fair to DELL (I can't believe I just wrote that), all the specifications were on the product page. Furthermore, a lot of other commenters pointed out that he bought a customized "Enterprise" model, so he actually manually picked an HDD and no WiFi card, and just assumed the machine would work great out of the box just because he paid a lot of money for it. While all the terrible customer support is on DELL, the initial issue is no more valid than me not looking up how wide a car I bought is, and then complain to the manufacturer because it can't fit my garage.
@@Horvath_Gabor Well, if it's a standard size garage and there are no warnings about the customizations not making it standard, it's still kind of a dick move on the company to not at least check in and say "Hey, your order is really different from others. Can we go over it real quick to make sure it's what you want and that you'll be happy with it?"
You know, like if you go to a nice steak restaurant and order a filet well done. They should ask "Are you sure about that? Filets are typically not ordered above a medium."
@@RandomPerson-nd2ey The core issue here is that DELL is not a restaurant, and by that I mean they are generally not selling to individual end users (their overpriced Alienware line notwithstanding). The type of pre-built PC he bought is for big companies to buy in bulk. There, boot speeds and loading times matter very little, so SSDs are a waste of money, and they tend to have specialized IT departments with built out wired Ethernet networks you can plug the PC into, making WiFi both redundant and potentially a security hazard.
Because of this, from DELL's perspective, this was a completely fine PC aimed at their usual customers, for whom this was a perfect (if still overpriced) machine. To stay with food analogies, it's less of a restaurant, and more of a packaged food manufacturer, where John decided to buy a ready-made meal without reading the ingredients list, and then complained that it had pickles in it and no eggs, which wasn't what he wanted, while the manufacturer just didn't care, because they were too busy selling the same meal in the thousands without any issues.
The problem is precisely that John is not their usual customer. He wanted a very specific type of PC, a rendering workstation, without actually doing the legwork to understand what components he needed for it to work. He didn't look into the specifications, only looked at the big numbers in cores, Ghz, RAM, and storage, and decided to buy the PC based on those parameters. That was bad enough, but then he went ahead and doubled down on it, wasting more time and money on support calls, delivery fees, and literally useless accessories instead of just getting a tech-savvy friend or UA-camr take a look at the PC and tell him what the problem was and how to fix it (read: get an USB wifi fob for five bucks, update the drivers, put in the SSD from his old machine until he can buy a new one, and once he did, remind him not to forget to actually format it so that Windows could actually see it, problem solved).
While the narrative he builds around this is engaging and fascinating to listen to, he pretty much created the whole ordeal for himself. If he spent half the time he ended up wasting on all this doing very basic research into the topic, and finding a local PC shop that would build a configuration for him, he could've gotten his dream PC for half the price and a fourth of the hassle.
@@Horvath_Gabor agreed, I'm surprised so few shared this sentiment.
If I were to go buy a guitar, which I know nothing about, I wouldn't go online and look for an expensive one and buy it without doing a ton of research or asking someone with experience to help me.
He could have contacted a Dell sales rep which could probably have helped guide him to what he wanted (if he really wanted to stick to Dell), asked a friend who's more techsavvy or even his community for tips.
@@CoryPchajek So, my stance kind of mellowed out on this a little after a recent episode with my friend.
He's been gaming on laptops for close to a decade now, and wanted to put together a tower PC after his current one started dying (plus I gifted him a used 2060S the last time I visited him). Since I already put together a few PCs, we had a long talk about components and what he would actually need for 1080p gaming, and the guy's by no means tech-illiterate.
So, we agreed that when he had the funds gathered by this Christmas, he'd call me so that I could help him finalize things. Instead, he called me and told me that he got some extra funds, and called a local PC shop he frequented on the spot and they put together a rig already, and I nearly blew my fuse.
Just to repeat: he wanted a decent mid-ranger for 1080p gaming, and I already had a nice budget comp written up with a Ryzen 5600, a matching mobo and 16GB RAM combo, divided storage with a small system SSD, a beefy HDD, and a standard 1TB SSD for games, and a good PSU about 200W over his current requirements, just so that he'd have room to upgrade the GPU later.
Instead, he bought a $450 Intel i7 that's a ridiculous overkill for a 1080p system, with a $200 mobo full of features he simply doesn't need, 64 gigs of RAM that's actually running under the recommended clock-speed of the CPU and is actively bottle necking his system, and a freaking 550W PSU that will have to be switched out the moment he buys a more modern GPU, all in the name of "future proofing". I repeat: this isn't a rendering workstation or a 4k gaming rig. He wanted this PC to play Skyrim at 60 FPS on a 1080p monitor.
So yeah. When actually tech-savvy people can make absolutely bone-headed purchasing decisions like that, I probably shouldn't have expected much from John either...
This is absolutely incredible, enthralling from start to finish, better than any movie Ive seen in years. You are an amazing writer and story teller.
i got a bit of shock seeing you had the same guilty gear backround as me, and spent a good like, 5-10 seconds just wodnering what i was seeing
How to get some amount of customer service from Dell:
Step 1: become famous.
Step 2...????, step 3, profit!
@@Kruskfar Step 3. UTTER AND TOTAL PAIN
Step 2: there is no second step.
Clearly you are all missing the south park underpants gnomes reference
@jabroni destroyer I surrender
"...I'm nearing the end of my journey"
> checks timestamp
> OHGOD
This is why I've built my own PCs since 2017, pre-builts always come with some half-assed installation. It's always in some part of the computer an inexperienced person would never think to check until it's too late.
The last PC I took apart had the GPU supporting it's own weight with it's power cable, and had the CPU screws drilled in so tight that they were all stripped to the point of disrepair. Building PCs isn't too hard, heavily recommend everyone try it when they get a new 'puter.
I love love love your videos man!
I'm blind but don't need to see to fully enjoy this amazing work of art!
I don't think i've been so entertained in years.
Some of the configurations Dell offers are just mind numbing. Nobody goes “Why yes I’d love a liquid cooled Ryzen 5 5600X paired with 128 GB RAM, GT 1030, and standard hard drive!!!”
I've seen so many young PC users with ridiculous amounts of RAM, a super expensive PSU and an overkill processor with a stock cooler and a crap GPU. Who is recommending this crap to them?
@@esprit101 I'd hazard a guess that it's no one. Now I can't speak for anyone but me obviously, but usually the picture I get is that there is no consulting others (except maybe a quick pm (dm in modern terms I believe?) to some perhaps more tech-savvy online pal (who may not be that tech-savvy at all) to see it looks "fine"), and it's more or less doing things with no understanding how they actually apply to what you want to get out of the machine. Big numbers look fancy, I guess, and being intelligent with the components gets tossed to the wind. On top of that, I have seen and heard enough horror stories of people with these sorts of machines where they utterly neglect any maintenance or intelligence use to the point they burn them out in two to four years - usually accomplished via quite silly antics, or utterly preposterous levels of overclocking for seemingly just bragging rights. It's very disturbing, wasteful, and ultimately just boggles my mind.
More options is ALWAYS better! What if the person already has an older SSD they want to reuse? Why should they have to pay extra for one they don't need? Shit take is shit! People should just take personal responsibility for speccing their machines out like total idiots because they didn't do the BARE MINIMUM of research beforehand!
Stop blaming companies for consumers being f**king idiots!
@@Cooe. There’s a difference between having options and offering them immediately up front. Not everyone knows computers dude. It’s irresponsible for Dell to market what are essentially nonfunctional devices immediately up front. Sure, there’s nothing inherently wrong with offering a computer with a mechanical hard drive. But it shouldn’t be the first result, as it results in an objectively worse user experience.
Imagine your grandma going into a car dealership and the first option the salesman shows her has some old shitty engine that is barely powerful enough to move the car. The salesman doesn’t warn her about its issues, and half the cars in the dealership are the same. Are you really gonna call your grandma an idiot for buying it?
Also, no, more options isn’t always better. Look up “overchoice”.
@@TagetesAlkesta Having the cheapest options be the automatically selected defaults in a spec configurator is how literally ALL online stores have ALWAYS worked!!! Why should that suddenly change ONLY for computers? O_o People should be aware by this point that "base models" for products are almost always bad value. It's not Dell's job to teach them that RIDICULOUSLY BASIC SHIT!
Dell shouldn't be held responsible because people can't be bothered to spend 5 minutes doing some reading up before a >$2000 purchase to find out if the spec that THEY PICKED is trash or not.
Junji Ito presents: "Dude, you're getting a Dell!".
I cackled at this.
I know this was over two years ago but, as someone who's gone through the highs and lows of learning PC building by themselves, this really touched me in a way I did not expect. I expected funny-haha-good-storytelling video and ended up getting exactly that but cried with you especially when your journey had come to its end. I love the way you do videos and the way you craft a story (even if you do talk a little slow at times)! Keep on keeping on !
As someone who has owned a terrible Dell gaming laptop as his main machine for a span of four years, this video is immensely relatable.
I got my Dell Inspiron 5000 when I was 15, buying it with money that I saved up from allowances and birthday gifts. I had no experience with the process of buying a PC and what to consider when doing so, but I know that my dad, who works in IT and knows his way around computers very well, always trusted Dell when it came to laptops. And initially, there were no problems with the thing whatsoever. It wasn't the most powerful piece of hardware, sure, but it could run the games that I wanted to play on it fairly well and opened up the world of playing online games and hanging out with your friends on discord to me, and there were never any big frustrations with the machine itself. Our old wifi was terrible and there were days I straight up couldn't go online with my friends, but all in all, it was fine. That is, until about one and a half year after I got the thing, when the problems started. And they didn't end.
I was no stranger to my machine not doing as I wanted it to. Sometimes, a Windows update would take agonizingly long to install, or a boot up would be unusually long. But in the end, it would always turn out just fine. But there was an increasing number of times when my laptop just straight up wouldn't work properly. Sometimes, the boot up would take 10 minutes or more for no discernible reason. Sometimes, it would slow down so hard, that just switching tabs would take over a minute, or the games I played would run terribly, despite my connection being just fine. Now, I didn't pay these problems too much attention at first. They usually went away when I updated my OS and my drivers, or restarted the whole machine. One of my friends, who is very knowledgeable about gaming PCs and how their parts work together, would occasionally point out that this was kinda strange, but whenever we talked about it we would just settle on "yeah it's simply a weak machine that doesn't work too well". But the amount of times my laptop would act upt that way increased, and more and more times, my usual way of handling it wouldn't work. The usual cope that I used to go with all the time was "yeah it's slow because the OS needs to do an update but our wifi is too slow so the update takes too long and slows down the whole machine", or something similar. I didn't really know a lot about PCs at that time, so it didn't matter to me how little sense some of my justifications actually made.
What I did know was how agonizing it was to anticipate a relaxed afternoon or evening playing some games or talking with friends, only to have to sit down and stare at my PC taking years for even the smallest of steps until eventually giving up and doing something else. My PC turned from something that used to bring me joy to something that would senselessly eat away hours of my life that I will never get back. I tried different things that my dad and my friend advised me to do, like cleaning up my hard-drive, wiping and reinstalling my OS, cleaning out my fans and obsessively keeping my drivers up to date. But it was all for naught. Especially, when everything just became so much worse.
I was playing some Overwatch with my friends one evening. I had my PC for over three years already at that point, and that evening, everything went well, luckily. The machine itself worked properly, our wifi was as fast as it could get at that time, and we were even doing well in-game, winning match after match while joking around and having a great time. And then, tragedy struck; suddenly my laptop started to emit an agonizingly loud noise that I can only describe as sounding like the desperate cries of a dying duck and my system temperature rapidly shot up to unhealthy levels. I quickly explained the situation to my friends and then shut down the machine. As my father helped me take the while thing apart, the problem became clear: One of my fans was completely broken, it couldn't spin properly anymore and nothing could fix it. So we ordered a new one, and installed it and OH MY GOD THAT WAS THE WORST THING EVER. In order to take out a fan, literally every other part of the machine had to be removed first. This included disconnecting shit from the motherboard. And don't even get me started on how you had to basically almost break the casing apart to even get inside of the thing. The whole process felt like it would just straight up break the machine if it was to ever be repeated. But alas, it didn't break, and I was ready for things to maybe become better from here on out.
It got worse.
It took an eternity for the system to be set up again, because obviously we disconnected and reconnected some stuff from the motherboard so the PC would just straight up not recognize some of said stuff on boot. Eventually, we got the thing running again, but the problems became much more frequent from here on out. I don't know if we actually broke something when replacing the fan, but all I can say is that from there on out, I dreaded every single time I booted up my PC. I would still play games on it and use it for stuff and it would work a lot of the time, but a lot of the time, it also wouldn't.
I got Guilty Gear Strive in summer 2021 and played it religiously, despite not being much of a fighting game type. And it ran pretty well. But ever since the incident with the fan, it started to run worse and worse.
It was an actual steady decline that you could observe. It started with the game just not working well occasionally, sometimes soft-crashing by keeping me stuck in loading screens, or slowing to like 2 fps. Then the crashes got worse and worse, it got to a weird point where I would have to make the game crash, hard-reboot my PC from within the crash and then boot up Strive immediately after the reboot for the game to actually work. No other game in my library did this, and I couldn't find anyone online who had a similar problem, let alone this specific issue. It got to a point where the game became unplayable, even with my "trick". Reinstalling it, repairing the files, nothing helped. My PC also went on a rapid decline in general around the time when it had its fourth anniversary. I planned to save up for a new rig around that time anyway, as I had just started earning some money, and it was almost as if my laptop took that as the OK to just straight up throw in the towel. Playing games on it was now bound to constant agony. I didn't dare to even show up to a lot of my friends' online sessions because I knew it wouldn't go well either way. I distinctly remember being almost shocked that I was even able to play RE7 on it shortly before I replaced it, but I also remember shit like not even being able to get a steady framerate on DMC4 on it on low settings. That was a general thing with it, though. Some games continued to run on it shockingly well, while others that should have worked just fine were total disasters. I eventually gave up on trying to fix it or trying to understand what the problem was and simply accepted that my machine was haunted by a ghost that specifically wanted to fuck with me. I remember that when my friends came over to help me build my new PC, we booted up my Dell machine one last time to set up a Windows install on an USB stick and get all my important files and data ready for transfer. And when I booted it up, it took 10 minutes, continued to perform every task at a snails pace, and my friends, who knew about my problems with the thing for years now, were still shocked witnessing in person just how agonizingly slow it actually was.
I never touched it since. It continues to collect dust in a corner of my shelf in my old room. It is over 5 years ago now that I bought it. It has been almost one year since I replaced it. My new machine was pretty expensive and took some work to put together, but it paid off. It runs amazingly, boots up in under 5 seconds, can run any modern game on gigh settings with ease. It still doesn't feel real that I have finally escaped the hell that was my old laptop.
But it's still there. I am not dependent on it anymore, I don't have to concern myself with it anymore, but sometimes, my eyes wander over to it, laying there, in the corner of my shelf collecting dust. I am almost certain that it's cursed. Maybe one day, it will blow itself up out of sheer spite. I don't know.
But the feelings of agony, of waiting for something, anything, to happen, to dread even booting up or just looking at the machine that you described here, have resonated with me deeply. If anyone out there considers getting a new PC. Please, for your own sake. Just build it yourself. It takes some time and effort to assemble the right parts without having to sell your kidneys, but you potentially spare yourself so much trouble in the long run. And, at the very least, don't buy from Dell if you want something gaming related...