Pro Support Plus, Pro Support, Basic Support, or No Warranty Upgrade?

[Light]

Looking at a new 7770 or 7670.

I'm wondering real world what considerations to consider when selecting the warranty option:

• Pro Support Plus 
• Pro Support
• Basic OnSite Service 
• No Warranty Upgrade

 

If I'm in a remote location where it might be just as easy to send it in as get on-site service, is there a difference in which support plan you would choose?

 

And to make the question more difficult, if I may be in Mexico in the future instead of the US where the laptop is purchased, is there a difference in which option you would choose?

 

 

 

 

[Aaron44126]

All Precision 7000-series systems start with three years of basic on-site service as the minimum warranty.  "No warranty upgrade" just gets you that.

 

The main difference between basic on-site service and ProSupport is just who you get when you first call in.  Basic on-site service might land you in a foreign call center with a rep that takes calls for many types of systems, but ProSupport will always connect you with a local rep in your country that is specifically focused on business system support.

 

ProSupport Plus basically combines ProSupport with accidental damage protection.  (There are some other benefits like a designated account manager, but that wouldn't matter so much unless you're managing a fleet of systems.)

 

I (unfortunately) pretty much always end up needing to make some kind of warranty claim on my systems, so I am glad to have ProSupport.  (For the Precision 7770, I called in to have the display panel replaced after two days.  It "worked" but had some pixel issues covered under Dell's premium panel guarantee.)

[alittleteapot]

I consider Dell's ProSupport to be an integral feature of the laptop itself.  I've never connected to a bad ProSupport engineer - they were at least fair, to good, to very good.  If you connect to Dell's normal support, or in fact just about every other laptop manufacturer's support, it's usually a pretty big mess.  My 7760 is now reliable enough to be used day and night, but early on it did have some GPU crashes that needed to be meticulously troubleshooted over the phone, who then sent someone to replace it.  I would shudder if I had to go through that with any other tier of support.