For a start, it’s refreshing that Dell is so open to the fact that its support hasn’t always been great. “We’ve obviously not fared too well in your own surveys over the past couple of years,” Griffin said, referring to PC Pro’s annual reliability and service survey, “and it’s something we’re very cognisant of.”

(I’ll interrupt myself here to say that if you haven’t already taken part – and we do rely on a huge number of responses to make our results significant – then you have just over a week to do so. And you’ll be in with a chance of winning one of our £4,500-worth of prizes too.)

I’m not fooling myself. I realise that it took more than a succession of PC Pro surveys to kickstart what Griffin refers to as a “sea change”, and one of those factors was the return of Michael Dell in February 2007.

On his return, Mr Dell seemed none-too-pleased with the drop in customer support – the term Dell Hell became a little too well recognised – and placed renewed emphasis on customer support. So I asked Tim: was Michael happy?

“I think ‘pleased but never satisfied’ would be a reasonable description. He’s pushing me and the team hard as you’d expect [but] this is a company-wide initiative and we’re all on board with it, it’s not something that’s a purely Michael-driven agenda.”

You’d have thought the boss would have been a little bit more than satisfied, because Griffin claims a 90% improvement in customer support. To be precise, he said that Dell’s “net satisfaction score” has increased by “90% in the UK over the last six quarters”.

Now this figure is based on hard facts – Dell receives feedback from 50,000 people a week via online surveys, so it has the data to back it up – and I’m confident it’s true. So how has it achieved such good results?

“One of the things that’s been driving our customers mad is wait times and being transferred,” said Griffin. “We’ve taken out a huge number of transfers in our system and, in that process, obviously delighting the customer with shorter wait times.”

What hasn’t changed is where many of the customer support teams are based. “We use India,” says Griffin, “but they’re not outsourced [contractors] they’re Dell employees [for] warranty-based support.”

Dell employees or not, I pointed out, such call centres are often vilified by customers who have to call them, but Griffin insists they invest in much training. “You’ve got language skills to make sure they’re fully understood, you’ve got technical skills to make sure we can actually fix issues, and then we’ve got customer service training to make sure they’ve got the right empathetic approach.”

But that, said Griffin, isn’t the key. “We find if you fix the issue and fix it fast, and do so with respect, then the ‘where’ becomes a non-issue.”

Of course, this could all be meaningless. If the results of our survey find Dell’s customer support rating lingering in the three-star zone then, so far as we can tell, it’s all talk and no action. And whilst we wait for the results – did I mention you can take part in the survey for another week? – I’d be very interested to hear if your Dell experience matches Tim Griffin’s claims.

If it’s taken you a little time to spot the “error”, as it did me, take a look at the options to the right. Thanks to Stuart Downs for sending that in!

I loaded up Steam for the first time in a while last night and was promptly asked to participate in Valve’s ongoing hardware survey. I’ve done this before, and the results are always fascinating, so I jumped right in. A few clicks later, and a quick scan of my cobbled-together PC, and I got to see the breakdown of nearly 1.8million gamers’ systems – with some surprises.

Just 41% of polled users have made the much-needed step to a dual or quad-core processor – the norm in pretty much all new PC systems sold today – and 38% have shelled out on 2GB or more of RAM. Assuming a correllation between the two, that leaves a huge proportion of PC players who are still trundling along on 1GB of RAM or less and a single-core CPU.

Monitors are also an interesting point. Despite the fact that we almost never review them any more, and few manufacturers are even pushing new models today, a startling 75% of polled users are still playing on 4:3 monitors. Of those that have moved to widescreen, nearly 35% have opted for screens sized 24in or larger, while nearly 70% are at 20in or larger – if you’re going to upgrade, you may as well aim big.

The graphics card section is out of date, with no entries for ATI’s HD cards or Nvidia’s 9-series or faster, so can be ignored, but there are still more interesting stats to be gleaned from the survey:

• Intel leads AMD roughly 60-40
• An awful lot of people don’t upgrade their graphics drivers
• 1,396 polled gamers have less than 10GB of total hard disk space in their PC
• Nearly 3% of polled users still don’t have a DVD drive
• 8,105 Steam users speak a language called ‘Simplified Chinese’

And then there’s the old Vista issue. How many gamers do you think have upgraded to Microsoft’s flagship – with DirectX 10 it’s surely a gamer’s paradise, right? Wrong. Of the 1.8million Steam users polled, more than 80% are still running trusty old Windows XP. Ouch.

Admittedly, this Steam survey has been running for nearly a year now, and some of the categories and entries could certainly do with updating and starting afresh, but as a snapshot of a community made up almost entirely of gaming PC users it’s fascinating.

Journalists like us can sometimes get carried away in the constant hunt for bigger, faster, better, forgetting the fact that the vast majority of users don’t want to spend money on their PCs every five minutes, and that for many, running Crysis at Low settings is good enough to get enjoyment out of it (strange people).

But mostly a survey like this just highlights the problem that will always exist for PC and component manufacturers: that consumer inertia is just as powerful as technology in determining their bottom lines.