My father-in-law, a retired orthodontist, needed a new computer to replace his old Dell laptop. He’d been very happy with his old machine, which last seven years with nothing more than an occasional hard drive upgrade, so we spec’d out a new Dell laptop at the website. We looked at a couple of alternatives both on-line and at stores, but the Dell prices were ‘good enough,’ so we went with them. He wasn’t especially price sensitive, but didn’t want to get ripped off and Dell did not seem like a rip-off, which was good.

He’s no computer expert, but he has a few things that he’s accustomed to doing and he is an expert at those, so he wanted his new machine to look like his old one. I spent some time, the dutiful son-in-law, downloading Firefox instead of Explorer and configuring it so that he couldn’t tell the difference. Likewise with Open Office. We cancelled his AOL account but — very nice customer service, by the way, astonishingly — they let us keep his username and mail account, accessed via their website instead of through their client software. My father-in-law was happy that he was saving the $25/month but I found the whole thing completely confusing; I don’t understand AOL at all. Switching him over to the cable company’s Internet service instead of AOL-over-cable was equally easy. Getting his new wireless router to work was more of a hassle and required a few calls to the Phillipines for customer service; eventually, I gave up and swapped out his router for one I’m familiar with, the Linksys WRT-54 and that did the trick.

We did this all while on vacation, but I was fairly pleased that a day’s work had set him up for the next seven years, with better hardware and software. (I was afraid to go near his old machine, it was so infested with rootkits and viruses.)

So we leave his place and drive back to where we’re staying, 45 minutes away. We walk in the door and the phone rings. It’s David. “Ed, I’ve got a problem with the computer.” I think, ah, no problem; this is why, smart guy that I am, I told him to buy ‘configuration support’ from Dell, a week or two of unlimited phone help. Not so smart as it turns out. I suggest he call Dell. But he had already, because apparently minutes after we left his house he couldn’t find something — the tabbed browsing in Firefox? the new Gmail account worked differently than AOL?, I’m still not sure — so he faithfully called Dell. Their customer service helpfully walked him through some diagnostics and then decided that what he really needed to do was to re-install his entire system, a clean install.

Which he did.

That got rid of the problem, but he was having trouble finding the web browser and called me to ask for help. Of course, the reason that he couldn’t find it was because Dell had told him to wipe away my day’s work, all the carefully configured Explorer-like tweaks I’d done to Firefox, the copied bookmarks in the same place as he knew from his old computer, the wireless setup, the whole thing. I was so mad that I wanted to break things; I think that I threw my phone at one point.

I went back the next day and, more quickly this time, re-did his setup and added backup software to we could go back to good known images if necessary. But that one call to customer service made me swear off (and swear at) Dell for consumer-grade products forever. I still like them for servers and enterprise stuff, but no more Dells for my family.