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Dell's support not very supportive

Fix it yourself

Letters re: Dell denies Opera users support

Dell's struggles to support the Opera browser have irked users the world over. Consensus opinion places the blame on Dell's Web designers and support team. Despite repeated requests from its user base to fix support problems, Dell apparently fails to see the urgency of the issues.

Sadly, The Register has been implicated by Opera 7.11 users as well. We blame you, Dell.

Ashlee,

I have been a heavy Dell Premier site user on behalf of my employer for nearly 3 years. As a significant (but not huge) customer, I have also taken Dell to task on several occasions for what I regarded as advancing Microsoft's agenda to the detriment of its own customers. I must state that I do not believe that the Opera problems with Premier are an example of that behavior.

I have used Premier with both Mozilla 1.2 and with Safari, and while there are quirks (for example, some links work only as "open in new window" in Safari) most features function properly. The problem as I see it is that the Premier site is quirky whether one's browser is an "off brand" variety, a downgrade version of IE, or IE 6.0 itself.

Now, right up front, Premier provides some important functions for record keeping related to our computer life cycle ops that would cost me a lot of development time to replicate on my own systems, and I would be in a world of hurt if it disappeared tomorrow. Having said that, it has always had its share of quirks ( at least), and is constantly under "redevelopment" to some unknown ideal. On many occasions I have had the pleasure of signing in to find that a feature that worked well for me in the past has been "improved" in such a way as to render it largely unusable. To make matters worse, the Premier support and design team do not appear to be accountable in any way to customers or to account reps; my rep and his team have expressed to me their own frustration with the quirks and constant changes.

So I regard the failure of Dell Premier to accommodate Opera not as a sop to MS, but just as Premier being, well, Premier...

Scott M


Hello Ashlee,

Might it be worth adding a request to your article that all users unable to access the page hit the "report error"? Perhaps if they get enough pissed off non-customers they`ll change their M$ ass kissing ways :-p

Best regards,

Colin Wilson

Mr. Wilson has a point. Here's a handly link to let Dell know how you feel. However, it seems Dell might not care.


Hi Ashlee

I work for a University and we have a purchasing consortium deal with Dell. I use ( well, try to? ) Opera and complained to our account manager, and was told that Dell won't bother to make the effort to fix it because there aren't enough Opera users to worry about.

Name supplied.


Ashlee,

Opera isn't the only problematic browser on the Dell web site. While netscape 7.X works fine on the support pages try and go to your "customized for your company" premier purchasing page in Netscape 7 and you get a whole page of nothin (empty graphics and frames) and this error message:

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a000d'
Type mismatch: 'GetContent'
/premier/include/content_footer.asp, line 8

So any time I have to go and configure a PC for an end user it's back to IE... <sigh>

Cheers,

Steve Chambers

Dell sure seems to make its customers work hard.


That's a cute whiny article you have there about Dell! A typical Microsoft Bashing Article with a Dell flavor.

It's really cute on the Register web site, where the page with your article fails miserably on Bobby Watchfire. Have you ever taken a look at the HTML behind your site's pages? Have you ever considered using percentages for your tables rather than fixed pixel widths, so I don't kill 5 inches of screen space on a 1280 X 1024 flat panel screen? OK, so it kills space in every resolution I tried.

The site is mostly a left to the edge of the screen table. Interesting mix of CSS and deprecated tags. How many tables did you really need for the layout? Funny you talking about Web designers. Look at the source for your article and the Register's home page.

Tom Goulet

You were not alone in chastising El Reg. And we've had our problems with Opera in the past(Opera breaks Register shock). And in the present, some ads supplied by third parties are throwing up weird formatting problems with 7.11. Which we are trying to address, but since it ain't our code that's doing the breaking, this is ain't so easy to address immediately.

So far as The Reg code is concerned, as corporate drones are apt to say after being asked a tough question, "Stay tuned. We have some surprises in store."


Hi,

Many thanks for your article on the Reg. about Dell and Opera browsers - it's been bugging me for several years (I'm an avid Opera user, too). I've brought it up with our account manager (and his boss) - the response is usually, "You can get Internet Explorer for free. What's the problem?".

However, I've found a way to get round the restrictions (at least on the Premier website for UK academic purchases and the support site), which is to use a recent version of Mozilla, which seems to work with no problems at all. It's a pain having to maintain 2 browsers - but at least it's not so full of security holes as IE, and is still being actively developed (unlike IE!).

Hope that helps.

Best wishes,

Andrew Foulsham ®

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