I am the assistant manager for a Comfort Inn here in southeastern Indiana. As a Choice Hotel, we are required to use Dell exclusively for our workstations, servers, and peripherals. Our equipment generally runs reliably and in the nearly three years of operation, all of our problems have been software related and thus covered by hotel support.

Unfortunately, we experienced our first hardware failure last night when one of our Dell Optiplex workstations began spontaneously rebooting. First we received a warning about a fan failure. After the second reboot, the boot volume could not be detected. Subsequent restarts resulted in bluescreens with MACHINE CHECK EXCEPTION codes and the ominous hexadecimal memory addresses. Finally the machine dies entirely and refuses to POST

So I call Dell. The guy on the other line was friendly, but evidently not very proficient with PC Support. He decides the fan must be bad and arranges for a dispatch to overnight me a new fan. I suggest to him that a new fan will not make a PC that refuses to post or power on suddenly begin working again and recommend he look at either the power supply or a backplane failure. He puts me on hold. Lo and behold, five minutes after consulting his “information”, he comes to the same conclusion and decides to send me a new power supply.

The sad part of all of this? While this machine is covered under warranty, Dell isn’t going to lift a finger as far as installing the power supply, since, as the gentleman said, “it is a simple part to replace”. Instead, we are on our own. Fortunately I have replaced my fair share of power supplies (and other PC components) and can do this myself. This begs the question; however, what good is the warranty and service agreement if we have to do the work ourselves?

Dell may have an exclusive contract with Choice Hotels, but if this is the sort of service we get for our money, Choice should consider going with HP. On second thought, as I reminisce about the incompetence of HP’s Support Department, Choice has only one clear alternative: Migrate to the Mac.

(Some other people have came to similiar conclusions about the viability of the Mac for the enterprise.)