In late April, my mother bought me a brand new Dell Inspiron 15 windows 8 laptop as a gift for my 20th birthday. As soon as I turned the laptop on, I ran into problems, the disk use would hit 100% just running background applications, making it nearly impossible to run anything else. And just the other day, I found that the laptop screen had cracked from simply being shut in the normal manner. I contacted Dell to try and sort the issue, initially we ran a diagnostic test on the laptop with the built in software, but it showed no faults. At this point, it was approaching the call center's closing time, so I agreed to have a call back the next day to try and resolve the issue. The next day came, and after waiting all day for a call, nothing came. I called back the next day, frustrated, but still just wanting a usable laptop, I spent a further hour on hold waiting to talk to someone, and when I finally got through, I was told exactly the same thing as the day before, after running further diagnostics, the computer still wasn't showing any fault according to Dell, again they said they'd call me back the next day, which I had plans for. Annoyed, and still wanting my laptop to be fixed, I cancelled the plans I had for the day in the hopes the issue would finally be resolved. After spending most of Wednesday 20th of May on the phone with Dell, still nothing was working, so they agreed to send out a technician to come look at the laptop and see what the issue might be. For this they told me to wait 48 hours for the appointment. 48 hours came and went, but as it was over the bank holiday weekend, I gave them the benefit of the doubt that they meant 48 hours on working days only, but I was still waiting a week later. Today, I received this email: "Hello Adrian, 　 This is in follow-up to your service request ........ for your Dell product. 　 We would like to inform you that we are still waiting for the product description to be updated on our records and it will mostly take about next 2 to 3 business days. 　　 In case of any additional concerns/questions please contact us directly by replying to this email (DO NOT change the subject line). Our work hours are from 8 AM 8PM GMT (MON FRI). 　 Thank you for choosing Dell. 　 Abigail 　 Client Technical Support Specialist Dell | UK & Ireland Technical Support" This email only served to confuse me, as it's their product, so I don't know what description they were waiting for, and to be told that after waiting over a week already that I'd have to wait even longer, I decided to travel to their Bracknell office, as I was staying close by anyway. After talking to the receptionist at Dell, someone came down and told me that there was nobody in the office that would deal with my complaint, which considering this was a huge office, I highly doubt that there was nobody senior in the building that could have dealt with my complaint. I was told that the matter had however been passed to a senior member of staff, who would be calling me today to offer me a resolution with my issue. It's currently around 10:30 in the evening here, and I'm still waiting on the call, so yet again, they've failed to keep phone appointments they promised me. Also, when I was talking to the lady she was saying "not to worry because the people that call back will be proper British people" which I feel was hugely inappropriate and also insinuates that I have a racial issue with their call center staff, (I am an avid human rights and anti-discrimination campaigner, and was horrendously insulted by this). This has now been going on over two weeks and I'm completely at the end of my patience with Dell, and fail to see why I should even want to remain a customer of theirs after weeks of what has been the absolute WORST customer service I've ever experienced. My mother is also terribly upset as she worked hard as a single mother to afford to buy me such a lovely gift, and now she's out of pocket and feels responsible for the grief.

TESCO TAT WHERE ELSE BUT CHINA TO MANUFACTURE YOUR CHEAP AND NASTY PRODUCT ? IT IS THE BEST PLACE BY FAR TO PRODUCE DANGEROUS, SHODDY PRODUCTS, UNFIT FOR PURPOSE. TESCO CAN ALWAYS BE RELIED ON TO KNOW WHERE TO FIND THE CHEAPEST RUBBISH. Yes, this is about a TESCO own brand toaster manufactured in China and foisted on unsuspecting little me in the quaint belief it would actually work adequately. I mean, what could go wrong with a toaster ? Either it works or it doesn’t. If the electric element heats up it will toast the bread. If it doesn’t heat up it goes back to the TESCO supermarket from whence it came for a full refund. It is the second TESCO toaster I bought. It took a long time to realise just how badly made they are. The first toaster just stopped working one day and as I had had it a few months, I didn’t think I would get anywhere asking the rapacious Tesco Supermarket for a refund. So, I bought another one. Silly ! I should have known better. Toast always seemed to get stuck and have to be prised out of the thing. You had to get a fork and poke an prod and lever the toasted bread out. The slot to put the bread in was particularly narrow, being obviously designed to take only the ‘ironed’, flat, mass produced supermarket white sliced rubbish apology for bread that TESCO foists on millions of people. There was no way this tatty TESCO toaster was going accept crumpets or any bread you might have to cut with a bread knife unless you cut it to carefully measured widths so thin it would inevitably disintegrate before you got it into the toaster. There was always a possibility of death by electrocution too if you forgot to switch the toaster off at the mains because your fork, or knife, or whatever, would touch the bare exposed electric elements that glowed red hot with death inducing electricity to burn the toast with. Nearly all toasters used to be designed quite differently with a flap you opened to place your bread in and then close it to push the bread up against the electric element. It was quite impossible for toast to get stuck and so no death inducing poking around the naked electric element with metal cutlery was ever needed. The reason I suspect this well tried and tested - infinitely more efficient and safer design - is no longer manufactured is because the interfering, goody goody EEC Euro control freaks sitting on their immensely stupid backsides at our expense in Euro fantasy land (that’s Brussels) have decided that particular, safer design of toaster is too unsafe and it would therefore be much safer if the electric elements were less open to view and were hidden away down a deep dark inaccessible slot in which you poked your bread into. These Euro crazed idiots didn’t think of the law of unintended consequences on their interfering, busy body diktats. With the original design of toaster no one ever had to poke around live electrical elements with metal instruments to prise out their toast. But with the newer design now forced upon everyone by the Euro Prats, a great deal of poking about with metal cutlery in amongst the exposed electrical elements of millions of toasters goes on, as toast is forever getting stuck. But, back to the real shoddiness of a lousy TESCO product that is basically a death trap. Like other toasters, the TESCO toaster has little vertical wires in front of the dangerous live electric elements to keep the bread away from the glowing red hot element because if slightly damp bread was to actually touch the electrical elements they could ‘short out’ and a fuse would blow somewhere, or else your plug would melt and catch fire or something. This kind of typical accidental short circuiting fault in all sorts of electrical equipment is a very common cause of domestic house fires. But these little wires in the grimly shoddy TESCO toaster are not the robust, firmly placed and rigidly immovable little wires they should be, securely anchored at both top and bottom so they actually do their job reliably of keeping bread away from the naked electrical elements. Instead, the wires are thin, not at all robust. They are flimsy and bend easily as you put bread into the toaster. But the crowning glory of sheer breathtaking, nasty, dangerous, shoddiness is that the bottom ends of these wires - right at the bottom of the little bread slot of the toaster - are not actually firmly anchored at all. Instead, the cheap minded designer of the toaster decided to simply run the wires through a little hole in a metal plate right at the bottom of the toasting slot. This saves the bother of soldering the bottom ends of these wires and means the toaster can be made more cheaply. But guess what happens ? Why, the bottom ends of the wires easily pull out of their allotted holes as bread is prised reluctantly out of the narrow toasting slot. This is particularly likely to happen almost every time the toaster is used if, like me, you either make your own ‘real’ bread, or just buy it from a proper baker, and then have to cut it with a bread knife. This non uniformly shaped slice of bread tends to easily catch on of these pathetically flimsy protective wires in this cheap and dangerously nasty TESCO product. This is very likely to pull these wires out of the holes where they will randomly twist and bend as the toaster is used and they will snag your bread even more enthusiastlcally, until one day they contrive to touch two or more of the bright red hot exposed electric elements which will promptly short circuit your toaster, or house, or possibly your life. So, that’s why my first TESCO toaster died so soon after buying it and this latest bit of TESCO Tat that passes itself off as a toaster has now got nearly all these wires waving in the breeze just waiting to cause a short circuit which will eventually kill the toaster, or me, or my family. Meanwhile using the shoddy little rubbish TESCO toaster is just a nightmare. Well done the Euro idiots and well done TESCO for producing a dangerous and breathtakingly shoddy product; and well done China for producing yet more sub-standard rubbish which is foisted on the rest of the World.