buks l.

I bought a Dell Inspiron (cost ~$800) end of November 2023. This was the third Dell bought for the business, although the brand name does not really play a role when replacing laptops. Since the first two performed well, imagine the surprise when the latest one turned from being problematic to being an utter dud. The first indication of trouble was when the Dell support assistant (to help updating the drivers) could not be installed due to a 'Network issue' error. No problem one would think. After many hours (first on-line) and then multiple phone calls with different Dell support people, no luck at all in solving the issue. Finally it was suggested that there are 2 options:
Option: 1 - Dell OS Recovery
Option: 2- Clean Installation through Media Creation Tool.
Option one did not work since one cannot download (remember 'network issue' and option number two resulted in a blue screen with error code - no access anymore to the laptop at all. To Dell's credit, they sent a technician to replace both the hard drive and the wireless card.
And guess what happened after it was established that the new hardware checked out fine (as did the previous disk drive and wireless card before the blue screen fiasco)? Cannot download due to 'network issue'. The problem we started with. Again long discussions with Dell support personnel, no solution. Finally it was suggested to pay the premium service fee so that another Dell software support team can help me. Which I absolutely refused to do, as this laptop has never functioned as it should from day one.
During all this going back and forth solutions like downloading standalone packages on another laptop, copy them over and try to installing them were tried. And that is how I learned it appears it is not possible to install any third party software on the new machine. As a last resort thought one can probably do better installing Linux as a second operating system, at least that will provide control for trouble shooting. You guessed it, cannot get it to install without severe error messages, although the two Linux versions that were tried both worked fine on the other Dell that is still in the office.
Dell by now has decided this is not their problem anymore and suggested I should talk to Windows support. Finally managed to get a Windows support person on the phone who tried to trouble shoot via remote access, however due the 'Network issue', this goes nowhere fast. After multiple tries they gave up too, and suggested a clean Windows install from a boot disk (similar to option 2 mentioned above). This was tried multiple times with different boot disk versions - no luck, errors varying between 'cannot find the license agreement' to cannot validate product key depending on what version of windows you want to install. Yep, cannot install anything on this very nice, brand new 1 TB solid state drive.
Since I travel frequently, there is not enough time to sit for many consecutive days trouble shooting a brand new computer. So here I am, nearly three months later (and Dell does not accept returns after a month) with a useless brand new laptop that has Windows and Microsoft Edge on it - believe it or not, one can go online and browse on the internet in spite of the 'network issue'. Just don't try to get any work done on it...
Really Dell, I cannot afford to buy your brand if one out of three products is a disaster.
Buyer beware.