Dell not in Chinese good books

Stan Beer
Monday, 14 August 2006 18:20

Your IT - Home IT

It seems that the Chinese gods of good fortune have not been smiling on Dell recently as the company now faces lawsuits brought against it by dissatisified customers in the land of the Great Wall.

In fact, after one of its laptops publicly burst into flames in June at a show in Japan, followed by reports of another pyrotechnics display in July, one could say it has not been a good year for Dell all round.

As far as China is concerned, the latest fiasco is a pricing error on Dell's Chinese website that had consumers in a lather thinking that they were going to get a PowerEdge SC430 server for about one tenth of the actual price. Dell China is now in damage control trying to explain to hot under the collar consumers that it can't simply give away computers for a fraction the cost that the company makes them just because it made a typing error.

However, the biggest faux pas on the part of the direct to market computer kingpin has been to ship laptops to customer with the wrong processor.

On the surface, there is little to choose between the Intel Core Duo T2300 that was supposed to be shipped and T2300E processor that actually shipped. Both processors have similar specifications and performance except for one glaring difference. The T2300 suppourt Intel virtualization and the T2300E doesn't.

In this era where virtualization is becoming a popular feature for users who want to run multiple operating systems simultaneously, enough users feel ticked off enough about being inadvertently short changed that in late July a lawsuite was filed against Dell for its error. A class action against Dell is now also in process.

To be fair to Dell, it has admitted its errors and done its utmost to set things right, offering full refunds to disaffected users. However, in China at least, it seems hell hath no fury greater than an irate consumer.