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Another Dell Gotcha! Very SCARY!


I was asked recently if I would look at a Dell laptop that was not recognizing a new battery. The new battery looked well made, fit perfectly in the Dell but was not recognized. I put the old battery in and got a message stating that the battery is at the end of it’s life cycle and buy a new battery. Here comes the gotcha!

If you buy a Dell brand battery it is three times as expensive as the off brand. Now I didn’t have a new Dell battery to test but my guess is that the Dell brand battery will be recognized by the Dell laptop. The 3rd party vendor insists the battery will work if you follow their instructions which involve updating the bios, the CMOS, yadda yadda.

Dell support simply said it isn’t our battery. Tsk Tsk.

Third party people provided a bunch of busy work that did nothing. I also found it interesting that the Dell bios upgrade could not be done with the third party battery installed. I had to put the old battery in before it would update the bios. Interesting.

Talk about locking in your market, if your end user wants to save more than a few bucks by getting a 3rd party battery, YOU CAN’T EVEN UPDATE YOUR BIOS!

Knowing full well no one at Dell cares but still..SHAME ON YOU!

I’m sure there is some way to make the battery work but I’m only willing to devote so much time to pro bono work. Is it any wonder that Dell and Despicable both start with D.

Comments

logankstewart said…
Yuck. Dell has always caused me grief. Both mine and my roomie's laptops have crashed and lost everything. Both have had battery problems. And we both paid too much for their initial costs. Dell is definitely not the way to go.
Andrea I said…
I found when I needed a Dell computer looked at, the vendor said we don't work on Dells. I did find it easy to fix once I purchased the part from Dell.
IdentitySeeker said…
Hah! Just what I needed; to feel justified in my complaints of Dell'S laptop range. I got one last year sometime and the hardware on this thing has caused a great deal of grief! Hope Dell gets the message!

Sarah

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