Dell - Truth or Lies?

[TarekCoyote]

Dell.

Good

• Tiny Compact Towers can fit almost anywhere
• Usually extremely quiet
• Comes with alot of the necessary hardware youll ever need
• The towers can look pretty cool, with a nice futuristic design

Bad

• Comes with alot of hardware that wont do everything you think youll be able to do (my buddy cant burn discs)
• Comes preinstalled with Bloatware
• Never comes with a windows installation CD
• Propriretary Hardware forces you to buy Dell certified and branded. (cant just walk in and grab a new DVD Burner and expect it to have the right plugin, for instance)
• Towers typically run very hot with lack of well designed ventilation (its quiet for a reason)

Those are jsut a couple off the top of my head, with my experience with Dell.


Dude, just get an HP.

[Some Guy]

Never again for HP , they Come as well with Pre-Installed Bloatware, and Say goodbye to Decent Graphics cardsin thier systems, they all come with Intel Media Accelerator Chipsets.

Used to be good before Intel ruined everything.

[TarekCoyote]

Never again for HP , they Come as well with Pre-Installed Bloatware, and Say goodbye to Decent Graphics cardsin thier systems, they all come with Intel Media Accelerator Chipsets.

Used to be good before Intel ruined everything.

hmm i run an HP in my room right now. It came with a Windows Vista installation CD (Home, but i cracked Ultimate instead anyways) and reformatted all the pre-crap away. The diff is, your not paying for the trials and bloatware like you are for Dell. Oh yeah thats right, Dell makes you pay for these "trials" in the MSRP.
Also the hardware is not proprietary, so i can upgrade my tower whenever with whatever so long as the part is obviously compatible (cant shove SD-RAM in a DDR2 slot, lol)

The obvious solution is just to build your own tower from the ground up. But as far as pre-builts go, you cant go as wrong as most as HP.
Compaq is terribly bad, theres a reason they're so cheap
Dell is.. well look above
Alienware is TOO expensive and owned by Dell
ACER is WAY too frigging mediocre for their own good and doesn't come with Video cards most the time, plus they're monitors suck but thats a different story for a different day
HP strikes the best balance between modularity and compatibility when it comes to pre-builts from the major manufacturors i find.

Of course, there's the hundreds of obscure little tower manufactures, which are better or worse in different scenarios.

[Some Guy]

i do have my own tower lol. built myself and it works nicely, and Vista is as of August being dropped by microsoft, why i dont use it anyways, it uses to much of system resources so i stick with XP until Windows 7 releases this Summer.

and HP's arent the best anymore, the compatability and balance dropped by 70% as of end of 2008 and beginning 2009 models.

[TarekCoyote]

i do have my own tower lol. built myself and it works nicely, and Vista is as of August being dropped by microsoft, why i dont use it anyways, it uses to much of system resources so i stick with XP until Windows 7 releases this Summer.

and HP's arent the best anymore, the compatability and balance dropped by 70% as of end of 2008 and beginning 2009 models.

:) Ive been building computers for myself and everyone and their Dog since high school when i started caring about hardware.
Still do, and i wont lie, ive customized and gutted the HP tower beyond recognition by now, only part left in there that came with it is the Mobo and CPU (Q6600).
Seriously though and while this isn't a debate for this thread, ive been using Vista since SP1 hit the streets. I did use Vista prior SP1 and i will admit the compatibility was terrible. But post SP1, has only presented me with one problem: I cant play FarCry. But i cant care, because i can play DX10 Crysis :)

The XP crashed roughly twice a day with all the apps i required it to run, got the Blue Screen more often than id like to admit, simply because i was rendering out a scene while playing a music CD in the tray.
The Vista, has never given me any guff outside of not being able to play some old games i cant care about anymore. As a work machine, its done swimmingly. Photo manipulation software, Video Production, DVD Authoring tools, Audio Editing and Production software, A/V Playback and Monitoring, Server backend, and 3D Modeling/Animation Suites. It all runs jsut fine, and the specs arent anything special:
Intel Q6600 Quad (2.4GHhz)
EVGA e-GeForce 8800
4GB DDR2 RAM (cheapo noname stuff i might add)
SoundBlaster X-Fi
801.11g Belkin Wireless Network Adapater
some crappy intel mobo thing
And on the surface ive got a Samsung 21.5" 1680x1050 LCD + ViewSonic VA series 1440x900 secondary display

basic stuff + dual-monitors, runs Ultimate + true Aero, with nary EVER a hitch in performance, even after leaving the bloody thing on for weeks on end without stop.

Either im lucky or i just cant understand what everyones problem with Vista is :\ As long as your not running software designed for Windows 98, you should be fine for the most part.


On the other hand, Windows 7, i honestly cant wait for myself. But it will be scary migrating all my stuff from the vista machine to Windows 7, i can anticipate problems... unless the installation comes with a "Vista > 7 Converter" haha

[Silvermink]

Hm, I've had very few bluescreen issues with XP. I think roughly half of them were caused by Oblivion, which is the only game I've ever played that consistently bluescreened my computer. And Fallout 3, which uses the same engine, doesn't - go fig.

[Ember]

During my time working at Kodak, I had a hundred or so Dell PCs of various types under my jurisdiction. These machines broke ALL the time, and very rarely was there a week where I didn't have to crack open a Dell case. Most often, it was HD failures but components frying were not uncommon. Whenever we had a power outage/spike I knew that I'd have 5 or so of them to fix back up.

The servers, on the other hand, were very well behaved.

On the plus side, the layout of most dell machines makes all the parts easily accessible. Overall I'd say that you can get a better machine for less from elsewheres. And, even if you're getting a comparable system, I'd still go with someone other than Dell.

-Ember

[librem]

I recall the Dell rack mounts being of a non standard size and that being a bit of a put off for some but I am currently using a Dell system for dispatching purposes, small quite and sleek in design when it comes down to it.

Oh! new release of Ubuntu 9.0.4 is out, first time upgrading to it took out my system LOL.

[Wyrd-Hotd]

Meh, i have had absolutely nothing but problems with EVERY Dell machine i work on... as for HP, nothing but love, we are running three in my house, My Desktop, and my parents two laptops, all of them are great, my machine is a TANK for the $400 i spent on it, the only thing i have upgraded was the video card (needed it direly, on board video cards = Fail)

As for Vista, not one single problem that i haven't caused myself, i dont mind all of the security crud ( Are you sure you want to play this game? >.< ) and i have only blue-screened once (Alcohol 120% and Vista dont like each other O.o )

[librem]

Ive taken quite a shining to Ubuntu but wonder what peoples experiences with GateWay computers have been.

[Kithop]

I avoid anything and everything Dell (yes, even the 'professional' line) because of multiple bad experiences with both home and business compies.

I used to work for a company that had a contract with Dell for all their workstations.  Everything from regular old OptiPlex 260s to the high-end Xeon workstations for 3D modelers.

A few months out of warranty, pretty much every motherboard out of ~150 failed with that infamous capacitor leak/pop problem, and it was a pain in the butt to get them to send techs over to replace them all.

When we purchased a new batch of machines later, we got stomped on (footprints and all!) boxes filled with machines with helpful hand-written sticky notes saying 'VGA FAIL WON'T POST' and all sorts of other goodies.

...we switched our contract to HP and never looked back. c.c;

All that said, I work somewhere else now, and we're actually big into Apple gear (lots of graphic designers/marketers, web devs, etc.) on the 'client' side, and straight up Supermicro/hand-built gear running Linux and Solaris on the server side.  Much, much nicer.  Apple may not have the best hardware build quality (ATI Mobility 7000 GPU failures on the old iBook G3s all the way up to getting caught in nVidia's 8600M snafu) but they have amazing customer service, both personally with my own machines and professionally at work. n.n  But switching to a Mac is not for everyone nor something to be taken lightly.

In any case, I haven't heard many problems with HP's business side for those kind of purchases, but they all suck when it comes to consumer computers - get a shop like NCIX to build one for you, or if you're so inclined, get the parts and build your own. :D  Much more fullfilling, and you can decide NOT to skimp on things like capacitors and power supplies like the big boys do to save a buck, so your computer lasts longer than their designed-to-fail-just-out-of-warranty garbage is.

</SysAdmin ramble>

[Some Guy]

i do have my own tower lol. built myself and it works nicely, and Vista is as of August being dropped by microsoft, why i dont use it anyways, it uses to much of system resources so i stick with XP until Windows 7 releases this Summer.

and HP's arent the best anymore, the compatability and balance dropped by 70% as of end of 2008 and beginning 2009 models.

:) Ive been building computers for myself and everyone and their Dog since high school when i started caring about hardware.
Still do, and i wont lie, ive customized and gutted the HP tower beyond recognition by now, only part left in there that came with it is the Mobo and CPU (Q6600).
Seriously though and while this isn't a debate for this thread, ive been using Vista since SP1 hit the streets. I did use Vista prior SP1 and i will admit the compatibility was terrible. But post SP1, has only presented me with one problem: I cant play FarCry. But i cant care, because i can play DX10 Crysis :)

The XP crashed roughly twice a day with all the apps i required it to run, got the Blue Screen more often than id like to admit, simply because i was rendering out a scene while playing a music CD in the tray.
The Vista, has never given me any guff outside of not being able to play some old games i cant care about anymore. As a work machine, its done swimmingly. Photo manipulation software, Video Production, DVD Authoring tools, Audio Editing and Production software, A/V Playback and Monitoring, Server backend, and 3D Modeling/Animation Suites. It all runs jsut fine, and the specs arent anything special:
Intel Q6600 Quad (2.4GHhz)
EVGA e-GeForce 8800
4GB DDR2 RAM (cheapo noname stuff i might add)
SoundBlaster X-Fi
801.11g Belkin Wireless Network Adapater
some crappy intel mobo thing
And on the surface ive got a Samsung 21.5" 1680x1050 LCD + ViewSonic VA series 1440x900 secondary display

basic stuff + dual-monitors, runs Ultimate + true Aero, with nary EVER a hitch in performance, even after leaving the bloody thing on for weeks on end without stop.

Either im lucky or i just cant understand what everyones problem with Vista is :\ As long as your not running software designed for Windows 98, you should be fine for the most part.


On the other hand, Windows 7, i honestly cant wait for myself. But it will be scary migrating all my stuff from the vista machine to Windows 7, i can anticipate problems... unless the installation comes with a "Vista > 7 Converter" haha

Migrating wont be hard, this is (For vista users) an upgrade to windows 7 , fortunantly the upgrade works for those who want to keep thier files while upgrading, But be warned, Have 16 Gigs of space free on your HD before installation of this OS.

As for dells, yes i hate them like hell, i swear they are the devils tool in some way, making every possible task extremely difficult without it breaking all the time.

[Mirka]

Weird, I've had nothing but good experiences with Dell.

Years ago, my friend bought me a dell computer for my birthday (well, I paid some of it too but he chipped in so I could buy it.) A month later the motherboard crapped out and they had someone come over to fix it for free. Sweet deal.

Then last year, I bought one of those Dell XPS 1730 gamer laptops from them. They treat me like royalty I swear... XD About two months after I bought it, I dropped my ash on the keyboard and it burnt a hole in the "u" key... I was PISSED because I dropped nearly $3000 on this machine. I called them and they sent me a replacement keyboard free of charge. I also messed up the front plate thing trying to get it off to replace the keyboard so they had someone come over to install the keyboard for me, and replaced the cover that snapped when I tried to do it. XD My warranty just expired and they called me and offered me an extension which is sweet, because it's experiencing problems from overheating too much and I think I may need repairs on it, or maybe even a replacement.

Their support is subpar, too. Since I bought that laptop I have some "preferred customer" number I can call, I get someone from the states (I assume), not from India, and they don't put me through the usual "can you make sure the computer is on, make sure it's plugged in, make sure you're doing something so obvious anyone with basic computer skills would try this before calling" shit. lol

I definitely wont be buying from HP again though. I bought a laptop from Best Buy, an HP - it died like 3 times and I kept sending it back to HP to get repaired. On the third time, they said that this is the last time they would fix it. Hello, not my problem. Maybe they should actually fix it before they send it back so I don't have to send it to them yet again a month later? lol

[Kithop]

Weird, I've had nothing but good experiences with Dell.

Years ago, my friend bought me a dell computer for my birthday (well, I paid some of it too but he chipped in so I could buy it.) A month later the motherboard crapped out and they had someone come over to fix it for free. Sweet deal.

Then last year, I bought one of those Dell XPS 1730 gamer laptops from them. They treat me like royalty I swear... XD About two months after I bought it, I dropped my ash on the keyboard and it burnt a hole in the "u" key... I was PISSED because I dropped nearly $3000 on this machine. I called them and they sent me a replacement keyboard free of charge. I also messed up the front plate thing trying to get it off to replace the keyboard so they had someone come over to install the keyboard for me, and replaced the cover that snapped when I tried to do it. XD My warranty just expired and they called me and offered me an extension which is sweet, because it's experiencing problems from overheating too much and I think I may need repairs on it, or maybe even a replacement.

Their support is subpar, too. Since I bought that laptop I have some "preferred customer" number I can call, I get someone from the states (I assume), not from India, and they don't put me through the usual "can you make sure the computer is on, make sure it's plugged in, make sure you're doing something so obvious anyone with basic computer skills would try this before calling" shit. lol

I definitely wont be buying from HP again though. I bought a laptop from Best Buy, an HP - it died like 3 times and I kept sending it back to HP to get repaired. On the third time, they said that this is the last time they would fix it. Hello, not my problem. Maybe they should actually fix it before they send it back so I don't have to send it to them yet again a month later? lol

I've been hit and miss with Dell's customer service, and I have more experience with the business side, but still - you have a laptop that's about a year old and you already think it's overheating/dieing and needs repair/replacement? :/  That's not good build quality in my mind, but then laptops tend not to last as long/take more abuse to begin with so I dunno.

HP's home user side sucks, yes.  Best Buy too. <.<;  I avoid Future Shop and Best Buy like the plague when it comes to computer stuff, save for maybe buying games. o_o;  They have no idea what they're doing.  When I graduated high school, I applied to work the tech bench at my local Future Shop, and they turned me down because they thought I was too smart... apparently their boss was just as much of an idiot as their bench techs were.  Worked out for me anyway, but yeah... I always head to the mom-and-pop stores like NCIX when I can. :)

[Mirka]

it does sound strange, but granted... I think the damage from overheating is my fault more so than the laptop's fault. I use to use this thing on my bed where it had no airflow and it would just get massively hot. It still get's quite hot now, but not as bad as it use to since I use it on a flat, hard surface now at my desk. I'm just super glad I extended my warranty because it keeps over heating to the point where it turns off for being too hot. It tends to happen once every few days... so if that gets to be a more regular thing I want them to replace it. heh