 Yeah, I understand. Well, the orders are in. We're back at HQ and it's time for us to review the most challenging portion of $1,500 SIPC secret shopper project secret agent, Magnum edition. Vynum, T-I, thank you. I forgot your name again. This is how all of our competitors responded to a fairly rudimentary technical support request. Hi there. I just was setting up the computer I bought for my brother and I noticed that in the system, it says there's only eight gigabytes of memory, but in the order, it's supposed to be 16. iFixit's ProTech toolkit gives you the tools you need to tackle any electronics repair challenge. Visit ifixit.com forward slash Linus at the link below to get yours today. So first, it's our favorite Alienware. Thank you for calling Alienware. The quickest way to get you to the right support agent is to get your product's express service code. This is different from your service tag or asset ID. May I have your service card, please? I don't know what my service card would be. System is listed on their premium support warranty. Is it basic? So I'm gonna need to transfer you to premium support. Is this five minutes already of just pure dicking about? Are we just sitting here in silence again? Hello? Hello? Is it me you're looking for? You know you're not doing on hold right when you have to come back and say hello? Thank you very much for waiting. Are we 15 minutes into this call and they haven't even gotten as far as we want? Are we being asked for the order number again? Okay, ma'am. This is the connector, ma'am. I'll transfer your call to the technical department. We're not at the technical department yet? Thank you for calling. We have basic hardware warranty support. May I have your system service tag or the express service code? Did you just ask for all our information? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Did you just ask for all our information again? Oh my God. We're explaining the problem again. Oh, I'm extremely sorry to hear that. Ma'am, this should have not happened. Well, it should not have happened. Yes, okay. Thank you. Astounding observation skills. I can just go ahead and connect your call with the engineering department, okay now? Are we getting transferred again? We have had nearly half a dozen people that we've talked to at Alienware in pre-sales and after sales support. Just put us on hold for a minute at a time. Why? What we need to do is, if you don't mind, is open a computer and just double check that you have two because it could be that one ROM is not connected, it's not like it needs to be like reset or reconnected. Can you open this, the Aurora R7, to check if you have the two ROMs? I could. Are you able to guide me through it? I don't actually know that much about computers. Yes, of course. See, she's remote at the end, and then she goes to YouTube and shows us the video about how to access the memory. Okay, alright, well I'm okay with that. On this video, we'll teach you how to replace your RAM modules on the Aurora R5. Nothing beats off peeling plastic covers off your new Aurora. Again, to Alienware's credit, this system is pretty straightforward to get at. Sorry, is this the right video, or are you looking for a different one? Yeah, this is the right video. So it says R5, but basically it's the same structure. So basically you have to open that panel. Do I need to unplug it first? No, basically you don't need to. Okay, so yeah, you need to unplug the computer and turn it off, but basically we're not going to touch anything. We're just going to check if you have the two ROMs. Do I need to unplug it? No, it's actually... What? Yeah. Okay. There you go, Janice's first RAM swap, everyone. Ladies and gentlemen. So in summary, do I understand this correctly? It took just shy of a full hour with five separate departmental transfers to diagnose a RAM stick that came loose during shipping. Hopefully the next one can do better. Here we go. All right, Origin, show me your leadership. Now before I proceed, I do need to verify the information that I have on the account. Could you provide me with the address that we have on the phone? Okay, so it took four minutes to get to the point where we verified the order and everything. That's not terrible. Okay, well yeah, I definitely see that the invoice says two 8GB sticks of Origin PC DDR4 3000 MHz RAM. It's possible that maybe one of the sticks got loose during transit, possible given the vibrations that the machine undergoes during transit. Ding. It's very possible that one of the modules came slightly loose enough to not be recognized. This would require you having to essentially open up your machine so that you can double check on this. Are you familiar with PC hardware to any extent? Like would you be able to identify memory modules on a motherboard? Probably not. Would you be able to help me out with that? Not a problem, absolutely. You got the email with the link to the Dropbox video? That's kind of weird. Why wouldn't they just host it on YouTube? I got to say Alienware's production values were a little nicer. That's probably not the way that I would show most users how to do that. Ideally using both your thumbs to put equal force on each end of the stick and you'll feel a very noticeable click. His video, 3 out of 10. His instructions, solid 9 out of 10. I got to say Janice, for someone who doesn't seem to have been doing this before, you've done this a lot faster than most of the customers I'm on the phone with. Smooth operator. Interesting. So we've actually thrown an extra curveball at Origin PC here. Plugging the HDMI connector into the motherboard rather than our dedicated graphics card. That big card has a ribbon cable that goes from the card itself to the motherboard. And if that came loose slightly, then you're probably not going to get a picture. This is a good explanation, but he's got the wrong diagnosis. Let's see how long it takes him. And to clarify, when you initially got picture, do you know whether or not you were coming out of the graphics card or the onboard video on the motherboard? He's done this before. 19 minutes, including a detailed explanation and walkthrough of the PebCac with plugging the monitor into the onboard I.O. versus the GPU directly. Competence. Great job. Thank you for calling ManeGear, manufacturer of award-winning PCs and workstations. Now this is the real test. If they can manage to turn an order number into like... That's not the order number. I'm not sure what that is. Oh, really? The order number would be five or six digits and start with an eight or nine. Okay, at least that's clear instructions. All right, let me remotely connect to your PC and have a look at a couple of things. All right. Pops up device manager. I don't know what he's expecting to find in device manager. He's probably just kind of like, oh, I haven't done this in a little bit. Hold on. There it is. Slots used, one of two. Yep. Nope. There's definitely only one stick in there. That's crazy. Okay, let's make sure that one stick didn't get loose. Immediately nails the diagnosis. If you look inside your machine, do you know where the RAM slots are? So 10 minutes to diagnosis. You should see a... Here, let me go look through one as well so I can be more specific. Oh, okay, nice. There should be four or... It could be four or eight, but usually it's four vertical slots. Oops, it's two. And it said that in task manager. I guess they don't sell a lot of low-end stuff. I would usually assume a main gear system probably has four or eight. Let's figure this out. So if you could just shut down the computer. Shut down the computer. I'm going to have you open up the machine and we're going to make sure those sticks are in there properly. Does he mention to unplug it though? Okay, so with the computer shut down, I want you to unplug all the connections from the back of it. Alright, rock on, main gear guy. Looks like that's all there was, just a loose RAM stick, but you're all set. If you run into any other issues, feel free to give me a call back. Sure, thank you so much. That's it. So excluding some random nonsense with our monitor not properly waking from an HDMI signal, etc. About 15 minutes. Start to finish. Dang. One quarter of the time and so much less frustration. Like it was just friendly. The voice on the other end of the line is crystal clear. I mean, you can't take that kind of thing for granted, honestly. Like you could understand the guy. For tech support, that's three. Straight to tech support? Like why doesn't Dell have that feature? Doesn't seem that complicated. If you feel comfortable looking inside of the PC, remove the left side panel of the computer, pull out the sticks of RAM and simply reseat them to see if in case one of them is not seated properly. Got the diagnosis. Is that, where would I find that in the computer? On the motherboard. Excuse me, mother****er. Did I even just hear you correctly? The motherboard. If you don't know what a stick of RAM is, I would advise you either seek help from somebody, a family member who perhaps has a little bit more experience, or have someone help you remove that stick of RAM and reseat them. Not everybody has a family member that can help them. That's why they bought a pre-built smart guy. Um, okay. I don't really know who to ask, so you're not able to, like, tell me what I'm looking for? I told you the sticks of RAM are on the motherboard itself. So, is it those two vertical pieces? On the upper right hand corner, yes. So your troubleshooting step would be to pull them out and put them back in, but again, be careful with that because if you don't know what you're doing and you break something, I'm going to put all your warranty on the system. Thanks, buddy. So I just should find someone else to help me? If you have a family member or a friend who's tech diving, yes. Is iByPower employing her friend or family member to provide their tech support? So he's just waiting for her to hang up, like... Alright, no problem. Yeah, not a problem to not be very helpful. But do anything. Unreal. In Dell's defense, they got the problem solved. An hour's investment in getting your new computer set up or whatever is not the end of the world given you're going to run it for eight or nine years. But to just treat the customer like an idiot and outright refuse to help them? Okay, you're not able to help me through that? It's not my ability. It's your ability to look inside a computer. If you're not familiar with the part, it's going to be very difficult to do anything inside of the PC. This requires more technical skill. It's not my ability. It's your ability. Completely unacceptable. I'm ready. It can't be worse than Alienware. Oh, so they don't even have an easy way to get in touch with them? I actually don't even mind this form on one condition. It gets best done. When someone picks up the phone, they have read and understood it. Hold on. I'm transferring you to someone who can help you now. Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with today? Hi, my name is Janice. And the last name? Tolkamp. So he doesn't have the form. What is the purpose of the form? Holy s***, he's asking for her phone number. All right, so what we're going to do is we're going to get a hold of the sales department. Why? To get solutions for your HP product, please hang up and go to www.support.hp.com where you can troubleshoot or get software and drivers. When your phone support that you can only call by finding the number by navigating the website tells you to go to the website, you're done goofed. Sorry, I still didn't get that. Just tell me what kind of product you're calling about. Desktop PC. Okay, we make many types of desktop PCs. You might say something like Pavilion, Spectre, Presario, Omni, TouchSmart or Envy. Go ahead and tell me what kind you have. Omen. Have your product model and serial number ready for your agent. Hold on, I'm transferring you now. Okay, Janice, so yeah, it looks like they did ship you out. Like the configuration that shipped you out does actually have just a, I don't see it showing 16 like the one that you ordered. We personally removed half the memory, so. Unfortunately, I only do tech support. I'm unable to access like any of the sales software to look it up, but I can provide you the number if you'd like. So here's the issue right now. Every company we talked to where the rep had an ounce of experience with PC hardware immediately identified the problem. I'm not imagining that this is common. Okay, I know that we were trying to get you over to like the Canada sales department. Did they send you back over to us? Yes. Okay, what did they end up saying exactly? Well, they did confirm that like the order was for 16 gigabytes. And then I got transferred a bunch of times and I ended up here somehow. Interesting. Let me see here. You should have 16 gigabytes. Right, yeah, that's what I thought as well. Special Agent Janice, ladies and gentlemen. So classic sometimes. Probably there's a setting that you need to check or verify that if it's security, I can connect you to our technical support. What setting makes RAM appear? Oh, the shortcut to downloading more apps. Is he actually going to start trying to troubleshoot for us now? Is this the magic moment, 20 minutes in or whatever? Let me put you on a brief hold while I do a little bit more research here. It shouldn't be any more than about probably five to seven minutes or so. And I'll be right back with you. Okay, Janice? All right. Thank you for that. Okay, how long were we on hold? 14 minutes. 14, twice as long. The amount of time we spent on hold without nothing happening is the amount of time it took like main gear and origin to resolve the whole problem. And the amount of time that Dell spent... In complete and utter silence. I don't know why they ended up actually transferring you back over to us. That should have been handled on their set of things in order to get that fixed because you just got the computer. It's well before the 30-day mark and everything like that. They should have been able to get that going to rectify the issue for you. You had mentioned like looking in the case and checking or like seeing if I had the two sticks, which I haven't done. I don't know much about computers, so I didn't dare do that. That's okay. Should I do that first? Again, Janice helping out tech support here. What can happen while computers are being shipped and everything, they do get moved around and everything. So it could end up being that it just needs to be unplugged and plugged right back in on both of them because we don't know which one could be unseated. And then it might actually fix your issue right there as being able to detect that it has 16 gigabytes after that. Okay. He knows! See, here's my issue with this guy because he has mostly come across as though he pretty much knows what he's talking about. The issue, though, is seems to be a policy one. If I had to guess within 30 days, it's sales problem. After 30 days, tech support's problem. He just was trying really hard not to have to do troubleshooting instead opting to send free product or push us back to sales. Like it's not like they weren't willing to solve the problem. They just didn't want to diagnose it. Isn't that weird? Like eight gigs of RAM, that's not insignificant. That's like 80 bucks. They were just going to send it. HP managed to be worse. 72 minutes to get a stick of RAM unseated and reseated. And HP had the advantage of Janice already actually knowing how to pull out and replace memory by this point. Are you ready to declare a tie? Origin and Mangear? With shockingly Dell, with that performance taking the bronze medal here, followed by HP, who ultimately did at least solve the problem with eye by power in dead friggin last. They're not even last. They're like, well, they just didn't finish. The Massdrop control keyboard is constructed with a solid CNC aluminum frame with a built in switch plate that makes it very stable and extremely durable. It's fully programmable with RGB lighting and QMK firmware, which makes it much easier to program and gives you more control. And at checkout, you can choose between Cherry MX, Kiwa and Halo switches, which will affect the price depending on your choice, but gives you an incredible amount of flexibility in terms of the feel. So pick it up today on Massdrop for a limited time through the link in the video description. Stay tuned for the next part where Ivan will be performing autopsies on all the systems, looking in depth at how the preloaded software came and all that kind of good stuff. In the meantime, though, if you guys dislike this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. But not yet. Let us finish with the autopsies and performance. Okay. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like not like this outward or this outer cool shirt like this inner cool shirt and our community forum, which you should totally join.