September 2008 - Direct2Dell

This is my fourth post on this topic.

Since I first blogged about this back in July, I’ve received many comments from Direct2Dell readers. Before I share more, it’s important to note that many customers may not ever experience video issues related to this, especially if you have updated to the latest BIOS. In other words, just because you have one of the systems in the chart below with an NVIDIA GPU, does not mean you will have video-related problems. If you do experience them, however, we will support you.

For those customers who haven’t read my previous posts, here’s the summary. My initial post defined the issue and explained that we published BIOS updates (hyperlinked above) that could help reduce the likelihood of GPU failures. In my second post, I published a list of systems that the issue could potentially affect. In my third post, I explained that we intended to offer a 12-month limited warranty enhancement specific to this issue.

Today, we’re moving forward with that intention.

Again, the limited warranty enhancement is specific to this issue and will extend coverage by 12 months from the date the original warranty term for the laptop expires. For example, one-year warranties will be extended to 24 months for this issue only. The maximum combined period for the initial warranty and the limited-warranty enhancement is 60 months. Systems purchased with 60-month warranties will not be extended. Customers whose warranties have expired will be eligible for this limited warranty enhancement from the date the initial warranty expired.

This table above contains the list of laptops that are eligible for this limited warranty enhancement. If your system is not listed, no action is required. Please note that because it is specific to this issue, the warranty enhancement will not be reflected in your overall system warranty that is listed on support.dell.com if you are logged in.

Over the last several weeks, we have been working with our service teams to ensure that we provide support for all customers worldwide affected by this issue. If your system contains an NVIDIA graphics solution AND it is experiencing one or more of the following symptoms, please contact Dell Technical Support for troubleshooting:

• Intermittent video issues
• Multiple images
• Random characters on the screen
• Lines on the screen
• No video

Customers in the United States can use phone numbers on this page to contact Dell Technical Support.

Here’s the process for customers outside the United States:

• Go to support.dell.com
• At the very bottom of the page, select your country in the Choose a Country/Region field
• Choose Contact Us on the left hand side
• Click on the More Details link in the Contact Tech Support section
• Click on the green Telephone button under the Call Tech Support section

If you still need help after contacting technical support for this issue, please let me know in the comment thread of this post. Thanks for your patience through this process.

To help its small and medium business (SMB) customers fully harness the power of social media to reach and serve their customers, Dell today launched on Facebook an innovative community and guide series: “Social Media for Small Business.” Social media among SMBs is skyrocketing. Bob Pearson, Dell vice president of communities and conversations, today will discuss in his breakout session at the Inc. 500/5000 conference in Washington, D.C., that there are more than 885,000 small-business blogs worldwide, and 39 percent of the Inc. 500 are blogging-- three times that of the Fortune 500. Yet, the mystery remains for many business owners about how social media works and drives business results.

Currently available in English as a Facebook Page, the community features:

· Guides on how to use blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, “crowdsourcing” and other social media channels to cost-effectively reach and serve the “Connected Era;”

· “Screencast” introductions to social-media tools like Technorati, Netvibes and WordPress;

· A discussion board to spark conversation and idea sharing;

· A best-practice forum that features a different SMB weekly; and

· SMB deals and news from Dell Small and Medium Business.

Early Adopters Get $100 in Facebook Ads Credits

• More than 100 million customers, prospects and employees are active on Facebook worldwide—presenting a significant opportunity for businesses to create brand loyalty and increase revenues.

• To help get customers started, Dell also announced today it is giving away a combined $200,000 Facebook Ads credits to the first 2,000 U.S.-based SMBs that become fans of the “Social Media for Small Business” Facebook Page. Inc. 500/5000 conference attendees will be the first companies eligible for the $100 credits. Remaining advertising credits will be available in the coming weeks and actively promoted on Dell’s small-business blog, SB 360, and via email.

• As explained in the Facebook guide, effective Facebook tools for business include using the News Feed to enable peer recommendations of products and services, building a company Facebook Page to be a part of people’s every day conversations, using the Facebook Platform to develop applications to meet your specific needs, and creating and buying Facebook Ads to target your business promotion to the exact audience you want.

• Company advertising dollars go far on Facebook. With a minimum daily budget of $5 and eligibility for $100 in Facebook Ads credits from Dell, businesses can start running campaigns risk free while learning how to target the right audience and reach new customers.

• Small and medium businesses are adapting to the “Connected Era” faster than large companies:

o According to a new study from University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research,39 percent of the Inc. 500 are blogging, compared to just 11.6 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

o 77 percent of Inc. 500 survey respondents said social media is very or somewhat important to business and marketing strategies.

o Use of social networking sites like Facebook among respondents almost doubled since same period last year.

Wiggly Wigglers, the 2008 UK Small Business Excellence Award Winner, is a excellent example of how small businesses can use social media to communicate with their customers and help grow their business. The business’ award-winning gardening podcast and Facebook group, among many other social media activities, continue to set Wiggly Wigglers apart.

I thought we should add a little something to the chatter about Apple today. Take a look at this to see how the Latitude E4200 compares to the MacBook Air.

Hi, I’m Debbie Davenport and I work with the team that is helping to make chat support available globally for most Dell products.

Let’s start with a definition. Chat means a lot of things, but I’m referring to online support variety. Here’s how the Wikipedia dictionary defines chat:

1. To exchange text or voice messages in real time through a computer network, as if having a face-to-face conversation.

That is an accurate description of the kind of interaction you can expect with Dell’s Technical Support via Chat – an informal conversation in text through a computer network.

Chat Support isn’t new to Dell but it is growing in popularity with our customers. The US has offered Chat Support for nearly three years and Latin America has offered Chat Support nearly as long.

Earlier this month we launched Chat support for all of our Canadian Business, Education, Healthcare and Government customers. We’re also focused on expanding chat in other places around the world as well. We have a quickly growing presence of Chat Support for our customers in Europe, Asia and Japan. I’ll talk more about the global aspect in a future post.

If you are a customer interested in contacting Dell Chat for support, here are a couple ways to do it:

1. Go to www.Dell.com/chatsupport
2. From support.dell.com, click on the Chat Online with Technical Support link that looks like this:

(Editor’s note: some of these images are hyperlinked)

Then enter your service tag on the next screen that looks like this:

You will see a screen like this one:

Note: If your system is not registered to a business, you will not see a Company Name field. You’ll just need to enter your name and e-mail address.

Also, we will only use your e-mail address to send you a copy of the chat transcript after we complete the chat.

Click on Continue and you will be in the queue. On the bottom left, you will see details on your place in line.

If you have any questions about the process, please share them here. I hope you find this useful – and hope that we’ll be “chatting” with you soon!

Last week, I had the opportunity to stop by a Green Room Session at Oracle Openworld with Tod Arbogast, Dell's Director of Sustainable Business. Just before coming out to OpenWorld, we found out that we were a winner of Oracle's prestigious "Empowering the Green Enterprise" award for progress against our goal of becoming the "greenest" technology company on the planet.  Dell's achievements over the past year and a half been well documented on the pages of this blog, but a quick summary includes our energy-efficient products, our industry-leading recycling program, "Plant a Tree for Me" and "Plant a Forest for Me," and the recent news that we are the first in our industry to achieve carbon neutrality.

I caught up with Oracle CIO Mark Sunday after the Green room session and asked them a few questions for this post.

San Francisco has been a blast.  Huge letters placed on a mountainside overlooking the city anoint San Francisco "The City of Industry."  The industry I've seen here has ranged from concerned and engaged innovators applying the technology that made this city famous to average citizens helping to clean up our planet for a greener future.  New ways of living and thinking are being born here, and there is definitely a sense that something truly special is going on.  We still have plenty of videos to upload from our time here.  Grist's Sarah van Schagen has been busy at work (that previous link will take you to her latest blog post updates) talking to the people of this city that have devoted countless hours to improving our planet and leading us to a future we can be proud to pass on to the generations that follow us.

Stay tuned.  While you're at it, check out our Qik page for the streaming videos I've been sending throughout the trip. There all also recent updates over at ReGeneration.org and there will be more here as well. On to Nevada!