To the forum moderators, what is your criteria for helping out?

Hi digitalwiz, Thanks for posting. As I'm sure you are aware, this Forum is for users to help users.  The moderators answer questions sometimes, but it's not designed to be a mainstream communications for tech support issues.Since your post states you purchased your tablet last Christmas, have you been able to reach Tech Support to troubleshoot over the phone?  You paid for a 1 year warranty, and certainly should use it to resolve your issue before time runs out.

If you need additional assistance, you may contact me privately by clicking on my name in blue, then on the next page, click the link that says "send message".  Please include your service tag information so I can look up your records.  Thanks.

Thank you Robert. I purchased the items between jul and nov 2015. the first one failed this past summer and the second one in january. Technical support is not helpful due to the recently expired warranties on these very expensive tablets.

The fact is that Dell developed the 7840 and it has a serious issue with it's battery life after about a year of use. my 32gig venue was a $500.00 tablet. Just a little over a year later the tablet is dead. Many people have the same exact problem and experience with this expensive tablet.

I think dell should acknowledge that there is a design or manufacturing flaw, investigate the cause, and offer a complementary fix to affected customers.

The alternative is to ignore the issue, which appears to be widespread and affected both of my venue 8 7840's.

I would expect dell to value me, as a customer who chose to go against the mainstream tablets to purchase a dell device. Dell appears to be telling its customers that it made a mistake entering the tablet market by ignoring this more and more apparent issue.

If dell is happy with taking my money and running then dell loses any goodwill with me and i'll take my business elsewhere.

Will I purchase anything more from Dell? that depends on how dell responds to this issue.

I'm not a regular computer buyer. I've bought hundreds of dell computers, me, personally. yes hundreds. you can look up my personal account and see them all going back to 1998.

Problem is, when something like this happens to a fairly obscure tablet, the manufacturer weighs up the potential costs of a recall/replacement against estimated affected users. If the affected are not large in numbers (and remember, this may not be all 7840 users, probably just a segment using these tablets with a certain brand of batteries produced at a certain time) then there is even less chance they will address it as the majority of these are now out of warranty. The sad truth is, they can afford to lose you as a customer. I see this with other brands (Lenovo is particularly bad) too so its not solely a Dell problem.

Now if the problem happened to a Galaxy Tab or an iPad, you best bet they would recall the affected tablets, because the sheer number of people that use these and the potential fall out for not addressing these issues outweigh the costs of a recall. The brand is also at stake. For a low volume niche product from a manufacturer not known for tablets? Not cost efficient at all to do a recall. The failure of your 7840 will likely not impact the Dell brand despite Dell's negligence.

I agree with your estimation that Dell won't likely do anything on a group basis. As an individual customer, Dell should make an effort after looking at my account. People tend to tell others of bad experiences with a company many time more than good experiences. Being a technology expert many people come to me and ask "what should I buy". Of course my answer will be. "get an iPad, because Dell makes bad tablets and doesn't support them".

Eventually the negativity will take a toll. Just look at Radio Shack. Once the place to go for tech, now going out of business. I bought something there once. It was bad and they didn't do anything to make it right. I never shopped there again.

Eventually you get a reputation for taking advantage and people avoid you. Dell runs that risk for every segment of poor product and support.

Who uses a Dell branded printer? I have a fleet of HP's. 0 Dell's. Because the word is out that Dell printers  are poor quality. Rinse and repeat over time and Dell goes out of business.