Dell’s Customization Sucks in India + Mysterious Microsoft Call

Dell in India doesn’t offer the range of customizations that you would normally come to expect from them. Moreover calling Dell may have some unintended consequences like possibly a call from Microsoft. Here are some issues that you would like to be aware of:

1. The widely displayed configurations doesn’t allow you to remove the Operating System (Vista from Microsoft) or the bundled Microsoft Works Software. They do however have a hard-to-find link to a special version where you can remove them.

2. I wasn’t able to remove the optical device (and thus avoid the Octoroi). I didn’t need them as we get all out software simply with yum install software_name.

3. I couldn’t reduce the hard-disk to 80Gb which is available with some configurations and competing vendors. We don’t need bigger hard-disks because all our data is centrally served from NFS.

4. I couldn’t also remove McAfee Security Center which is useless for a Linux machine.

Overall I was disheartened with the minimal customizations I could make. I had better experience calling up Lenovo in Kolkata.

These observations were made for product with E-VALUE CODE : R220301. This is one of the many standard products which you can find out by clicking on Desktops -> Small Business / Commercial and then selecting customise (Dell adopted british spellings for India).

Note: There is a rather convoluted way to remove Microsoft Windows Vista or other Microsoft software from Dell machines.

Did I mention that soon after I received a call from Microsoft inquiring about Windows usage in my company and that I should look into installing Windows for new machines.

On a different note Dell’s website isn’t searchable with E-value code which is widely advertised everywhere. They expect two inputs for e-value code while the code is something like R220301. I tried different combinations without success. The customer service representative couldn’t help me either. I am pretty confident that their e-value code search is inoperable.