Posts by Chris Cox

Dell parks itself in PC superstores across Europe

@PC World

I used to be a Technician in PC World.

I'd agree with Adam. We had a store with £5m turnover, 18 staff, clinic manned primarily by me, dealing with umpteen irate people per day, the VAST majority of whom had caused whatever problem they were whinging about themselves - laptops dropped/lids closed on pens, files deleted etc etc. The actual failure rate of the products was pretty low. The main problem is the average computer literacy of the PC World customer.

I would agree on training. I am self taught, I was trained nothing in PC World, despite many training initiatives from head office, in reality, non of the stores that I know of have anything like the time to actually do any training.

What I would say is give the guys in the stores a break. It's crap hours, crap pay, abuse all day from frankly moron customers who are clueless and expect things to be fixed instantly, all for a starting Technician salary of about £5.75 per hour.

If you take a close look, PC World's PC/Laptop prices are extremely competitive, and not a rip off at all, the rip off comes in inks and software etc, but then there are retail premises to pay for, unlike internet vendors.

If DSGi put some real effort into training and importantly staff retention, it would actually be ok, but its a stepping stone on the career ladder for too many people and as such customer service will always suffer.

As a final point, Dell - garbage. We had dozens of customers with Dells each month who came to us because Dell's support was so bad.

All of you who sit in an office somewhere giving internal support should consider what it is like to spend 10 hours a day giving support at a public desk to people who are clueless before critising people who do the bestthey can given the circumstances.

Microsoft grows despite Windows Vista

Vista vs XP

Many of my customers ask me about the benefits of moving from a stable XP environment to Vista.

It's actually hard to recommend Vista to the casual user, particularly due to the support headache the inevitable installation of XP drivers or non compatible software will cause. Yes the interface is nice (if you have a decent PC), and yes it's more secure and user friendly, but the main question I get asked is "does it have a word processor etc" - Vista doesn't actually include anything useful for the majority of users over XP and the prospect of buying Vista, Office, a compatible ADSL modem and downloading piles of drivers etc isnt very appealing.

XP was a reason to upgrade because 98 (and especially Me) were so out of date, for the layman Vista is a facelift that causes more problems than it solves.

It's hardly suprising that Microsoft's (and my own companies) expectations of a golden goose in the first half of the year didn't materialise.