When Dell launched its Vostro line of computers for the small business market, it said it would make it more attractive for customers by not bundling any of "trialware" junk. Unfortunately, as one reader reports, Vostro customers are discovering that owning the systems can nonetheless be quite a trial.
When Dell launched its Vostro line of computers for the small business market, it said it would make it more attractive for customers by not bundling any of "trialware" junk. Unfortunately, as one reader reports, Vostro customers are discovering that owning the systems can nonetheless be quite a trial.
"Dell's effort to court the small business market with its new Vostro line of computers may be foundering," the reader first wrote me during the holidays. "Recent messages on Dell's Community Forum have complained about new Vostro 200s that fail to boot. The problem appears to be related to an error in the current BIOS or a configuration error in the image used to install Windows XP. Dell's response has been to ignore the issue, leaving its small business customers to fend for themselves in an effort to come up with a solution. This doesn't seem like a very promising approach to winning customer confidence."
The reader was one of a number of Vostro customers on the forum who were reporting they'd encountered a "Black Screen of Death" with their new systems. "I've experienced the problem with two of them so far and I still have one more in the box," the reader wrote. "We have ordered Dell computers for many years and had planned to continue ordering a few Vostros each month as we upgrade all our desktop machines. Unless Dell addresses this issue very soon, we will be forced to move to a different vendor. I don't have the time to repair new computers right after I've pulled them out of the box."
Attempts by the reader and others on the forum to get help from Dell support yielded no solutions, nor even an admission from Dell that there was a problem with the Vostros. "I did see a message from a Dell employee on a somewhat related thread in Dell's forum where several customers had attempted to fix the black screen problem by updating the BIOS," the reader wrote. "Unfortunately, a bug in version 1.08 of the Vostro BIOS causes the computer's fan to run continuously at full speed. A message from the Dell employee stated they were watching the thread and the issue had been escalated. Weeks later the buggy BIOS was still available and Dell was offering no solution or warning. Apparently escalation is a slow process at Dell."
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