Dude, I Can’t Believe I’m Getting a Dell
Yep, I did it again. I ordered yet another PC from Dell. I wasn’t exactly happy about ordering my latest box from convicted fraudsters; but nobody else I trusted came close on price, especially when the Memorial Day sale price kicked in. I actually wanted a less powerful system with no monitor, mouse, or keyboard and Windows XP; but that would have cost quite a bit more than what I did buy.
I most certainly did not buy the extended 3 year warranty with onsite service. I have no faith at all that Dell would actually fulfill any part of that promise. However, this isn’t a mission critical system (I mostly bought it for Age of Conanexperimenting with Java 7) and I’m capable of supporting myself for most tasks.
I thought about CyberPower, but their support rep was even more hideous than Dell’s. (Dell’s support is bad. CyberPower’s is non-existent.) I also looked at Alienware, but they were both expensive and slammed in support.
I also looked at Fry’s and Newegg, but even building it myself (which I didn’t want to do) the price would have been higher than from Dell.
The big boys (Lenovo, HP, etc.) didn’t really offer the rig I wanted, especially when it came to graphics. Gateway I trust about as much as I trust Dell (roughly the distance I can throw one of their larger desktops), but they were quite a bit more expensive. If I had been aiming at a business/development box or a real high end gaming system, the results might have been different; but Dell did the best job of configuring me a relatively cheap system with a top-end NVidia graphics card.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:17 PM
Let’s hope it’s not like the “Wonderful One-Hoss Shay”, a tale of planned obsolescence and its opposite that all engineering types should read.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:16 PM
Good luck! That’s all I can say. Dell is simply the worst company in the business for support. I’m sure you are capable of doing maintenance, but the real problem with Dell is the quality of the parts in the original units shipped over the past 3-4 years. If (for example) a MB is bad, you’re not going to replace that yourself. You’d assume it is under warranty. That is when you’ll enter Dell Hell. And you are going to install third-party apps! Surely any problems will be attributed to the software in those apps.
Dell is fine for big orgs, since there is (usually) a person to handle all the problems as a paying job. But when you buy one or two from them yourself, _you_ are on the hook for the service and support calls. And this is too well documented to even repeat. IMO the NY ruling will have 0 effect on them, since if they haven’t gotten the message by now I don’t think they’ll get it after the ruling.
Like I said – good luck. If even the smallest thing goes wrong, you’ll need it!
May 29th, 2008 at 2:38 PM
I like Dell. I started buying Dell server for my former employer some 8 years ago and they stuck with it ever since, even got resellers. I bought myself a Dell Inspiron notebook three and a half years ago and it still runs and runs and runs – and it runs an awful lot of time every day. I had to replace the keyboard (found out it doesn’t like mik too much) and the power adapter. but that was done with a phone call late afternoon and the other day I got received the replacement part. Others around me started to buy Dell PCs and notebooks and they love ’em!
I still recommend Dell for Windows or Linux users. I myself finally switched to an Apple iMac at home two weeks ago and I have to admit, that I never felt more home on a system, be it DOS, Windows, TOS, AmigaOS, BeOS, Ubuntu, Irix, …
May 30th, 2008 at 10:09 PM
And Rusty already owns a mac… but he wants this machine for toying with Java 7, which he won’t be able to do on a mac for the next 3 years at least.