Dell used to not suck

[Pooh Bear]

Bob Monsen wrote:

John Larkin wrote:


I've had bad experiences with the Fry's in Palo Alto. They practically
strip-search you on the way out to verify all your stuff against the
receipt. And they repackage returns and sell them as new. I bought an
inkjet printer and when I opened the box, the cartrige was installed
and there was ink everywhere. It had obviously been repacked.


Yes, Fry's sucks for some things. I've had issues with their 'new'
printers too.

Much better to buy the components online and build the system yourself.
Or, better yet, hire a college kid to come in and do it for you. It's
trivial, takes about 2 hours to put one together, and another couple of
hours to install XP and the drivers.

Haha ! You should have seen the fun I had installing a network card driver
recently !

Graham

 

[Pooh Bear]

Terry Given wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 18 May 2005 19:38:33 +0100, Pooh Bear
rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote:


John Larkin wrote:


But now they do.

Unfortunate experience ?



Yeah. I just bought two new "Precision" workstations that are a
mechanical mess. The case design is awful and the floppies are
unreliable due to mechanical stupidities. Their support people told me
to reinstall Windows, the single time I got a human to respond.

The electronics looks fine, but they garbled the packaging pretty
badly. The support is either email robots or people in India reading
scripts.

Who makes good PCs these days?


John


Alas, I have had much the same problem with Dell - will never use them
again. Cheap, with what sounds like good warranties. But having spent 5
hours on the phone convincing some malaysian that my hard drive was dead
(smoke came out of it) *before* I got any on-site technical support, I
now know their support aint what it purports to be. We bought 6 dell PCs
(2000), and within a year had similar problems with all of them. In the
end we gave up on Dells *free* tech support, and paid a local to do it
for us, as it was cheaper (our time aint free)

I would conclude similarly. The bust PSU in the Dell I mentioned in another
post, we thought to be a Dell design but actually I think was just a
standard ATX type. Could have gone to PC World ( yuk - but there's plenty
around ) and bought one for Ł20 and had the thing up and running the same
day.

Graham

 

[Pooh Bear]

Spehro Pefhany wrote:

On Wed, 18 May 2005 13:08:10 -0700, the renowned John Larkin
jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Wed, 18 May 2005 19:38:33 +0100, Pooh Bear
rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote:


John Larkin wrote:

But now they do.

Unfortunate experience ?


Yeah. I just bought two new "Precision" workstations that are a
mechanical mess. The case design is awful and the floppies are
unreliable due to mechanical stupidities. Their support people told me
to reinstall Windows, the single time I got a human to respond.

The electronics looks fine, but they garbled the packaging pretty
badly. The support is either email robots or people in India reading
scripts.

Who makes good PCs these days?


John

I go to one of the little computer shops I trust, tell them exactly
what to use for each part (or ask their advice if I haven't researched
it) and get them to put it together and set it up (and transfer data
if I want). More expensive (and takes more time to buy), but I know
exactly what's in there, and it's all interchangable industry-standard
brand-name stuff (even the case, and especially the power supply). All
the parts come from a small number of wholesalers, and what they don't
have in stock they get the next day, so it's not too bad once I've
figured out what I need.

The mass-produced stuff is fine for someone *else* to use for word
processing or whatever, but I really don't want to have to use it
myself. The stores take credit cards, and the small shops all want
cash or debit (or a big surcharger), but that's a minor inconvenience.

Not dissimilar to my approach either. My newest PC was built with a combo of
parts I bought online from suppliers I'd used before and found reliable and also
bits from a local small specialist store.

Using generic bits makes life quite easy.

Graham

 

[Philip Pemberton]

In message <jp7n81hafgeif3titm3m00575llq9m1gfn@4ax.com>
John Larkin <jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

Who makes good PCs these days?

Me!
Built my Athlon64 system from scratch over this past weekend, using parts I
got from Kustom PCs (<www.kustompcs.co.uk&gt. I ended up buying an Athlon64
3200+ CPU, an ASUS A8V Deluxe mainboard, a Club3D geForce 6600GT 128MB, 512MB
of DDR400 RAM and an Akasa Paxpower 460W power supply.

I already had an 80GB Maxtor D740X hard drive, a Sony MFD920 floppy drive and
a LiteON LDW-851S DVD ReWriter. The DVD-RW, incidentally, is running a
patched version of the SOHW-832S firmware, which means my lowly 851S can now
burn dual-layer DVD recordables

The machine is rock stable, and I *know* what the build quality is like 'cos
I built it myself! All the cables are folded, tied and tucked under metalwork
as necessary. Shame it's in a closed box really. I should get a sheet of
plastic from the local hobby shop and put a window in the case. That and
respray it something other than beige and light blue...

Later.
--
Phil. | Acorn RiscPC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB,
philpem@despammed.com (valid address)| ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice,
http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI
No to DRM, software patents and the EUCD! <http://www.ukcdr.org/>
.... Hey! Your Trakball is upside down!

 

[Frithiof Andreas Jensen]

"John Larkin" <jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message
news:jp7n81hafgeif3titm3m00575llq9m1gfn@4ax.com...

Who makes good PCs these days?

HP got some very nice boxes for their mini-towers. No Screws required!

 

[Frithiof Andreas Jensen]

"Rob Gaddi" <rgaddi@bcm.YUMMYSPAMtmc.edu> wrote in message
news:d6g7ra$7gb@gazette.corp.bcm.tmc.edu...

Fry's and a day spent assembling it.

The Way of Pain!

Buy the thing assembled, from a local outlet, so that you can trow it back
at them for a refund when it does not work.

You pay, what, USD 75 extra for the assembled version, get a warranty, and
you do not have to spend a day putting the box together and another day
downloading drivers (and days returning stuff and arguing the toss).

So, Why abandon 2 years of warranty to the doubtful quest of integrating
different components from different vendors who will all blame each other
when something does not work??

I would install/re-install the OS myself though, from untainted media NOT
the "system restore disk", "They" always manage to fuck up preloads;

I think this is for two reasons:

1) The Prince of Lies, i.e. Marketing, put nitwit "tools" written by
ebola-ridden monkeys* onto the machine, said tools main functionality is to
splatter the company logo onto every visible display element, redirect
keypresses to the corporate web site in the hope of getting some traffic to
justify the USD 10000000 advertising budget.

2) Because they buy preloaded batches of the drives in the factory to save
time & effort and then the hardware configuration is changed downstream by
some "production engineer" so the OS no longer match the hardware.


*) The cheapest option: The monkeys died before they ate all the peanuts!

 

[Bob Monsen]

Philip Pemberton wrote:

In message <jp7n81hafgeif3titm3m00575llq9m1gfn@4ax.com
John Larkin <jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:


Who makes good PCs these days?


Me!
Built my Athlon64 system from scratch over this past weekend, using parts I
got from Kustom PCs (<www.kustompcs.co.uk&gt. I ended up buying an Athlon64
3200+ CPU, an ASUS A8V Deluxe mainboard, a Club3D geForce 6600GT 128MB, 512MB
of DDR400 RAM and an Akasa Paxpower 460W power supply.

I already had an 80GB Maxtor D740X hard drive, a Sony MFD920 floppy drive and
a LiteON LDW-851S DVD ReWriter. The DVD-RW, incidentally, is running a
patched version of the SOHW-832S firmware, which means my lowly 851S can now
burn dual-layer DVD recordables

The machine is rock stable, and I *know* what the build quality is like 'cos
I built it myself! All the cables are folded, tied and tucked under metalwork
as necessary. Shame it's in a closed box really. I should get a sheet of
plastic from the local hobby shop and put a window in the case. That and
respray it something other than beige and light blue...

What, no case light? Take a look at the systems they sell on ebay...

---
Regards,
Bob Monsen

 

[budgie]

On Wed, 18 May 2005 10:19:53 -0700, John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

But now they do.

They used to not suck? Must have been before my time ...

 

[Rene Tschaggelar]

John Larkin wrote:

But now they do.

John for a desktop, I can recommend selfbuild. Buy a case,
motherboard, diskdrive, powersupply, graphics card and
whatever else is required. Of most importance set a low
(accoustical-)noise powersupply. And thus not top of the
range clock speed. A 3GHz 64bit Athlon will do nicely,
provided you spend a gig or more of RAM.

Rene
--
Ing.Buero R.Tschaggelar - http://www.ibrtses.com
& commercial newsgroups - http://www.talkto.net

 

[Richard H.]

John Larkin wrote:

Who makes good PCs these days?

YMMV, but I've enjoyed a good 6 months so far with with the top-end Sony
pre-built from Fry's. Only had to add a couple external SATA drives for
backup (one of which has already failed).

Very quiet system. 3.4GHz P4, 1GB, 250GB, 256MB video - for the same
money, a better package (DRAM, VRAM) than the same Sony model elsewhere.
I'm told it's liquid cooled, but it's all encased so it "just works".

I looked at rolling my own, but for the same money I got a turnkey
system with extra goods - zero installation effort, and I can focus on
some other project on the list.

Richard

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

John Larkin wrote:

But now they do.

John

To paraphrase their old TV commercials, "Dude, their going to hell!"

--
Former professional electron wrangler.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[keith]

On Sun, 22 May 2005 22:33:33 +0000, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

But now they do.

John

To paraphrase their old TV commercials, "Dude, their going to hell!"

Dude, you're gettin' a cell.

--
Keith

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 21 May 2005 20:12:19 +0200, Rene Tschaggelar <none@none.net>
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

But now they do.


John for a desktop, I can recommend selfbuild. Buy a case,
motherboard, diskdrive, powersupply, graphics card and
whatever else is required. Of most importance set a low
(accoustical-)noise powersupply. And thus not top of the
range clock speed. A 3GHz 64bit Athlon will do nicely,
provided you spend a gig or more of RAM.

Rene

Well, I have a company to run, and the last thing I want to do is
struggle with more electronics and software; I want to buy a reliable
PC with everything installed and working. I liked Dell because they'd
ship a system that was ready to run out of the box, and if you needed
support they'd answer the phone and help you right away. But the last
two Dells I bought had junky packaging, a stupid design fault around
the floppies, and they showed no particular interest in fixing it.

John

 

[Robert]

"John Larkin" <jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message
news:dgtj91lt3sh112ko780b3ck0p5ijaip337@4ax.com...

On Sat, 21 May 2005 20:12:19 +0200, Rene Tschaggelar <none@none.net

Well, I have a company to run, and the last thing I want to do is
struggle with more electronics and software; I want to buy a reliable
PC with everything installed and working. I liked Dell because they'd
ship a system that was ready to run out of the box, and if you needed
support they'd answer the phone and help you right away. But the last
two Dells I bought had junky packaging, a stupid design fault around
the floppies, and they showed no particular interest in fixing it.

John

It seems that Dell has moved up the chain to where most of their revenue
comes from large accounts. So if you are a small account, business or
consumer, they aren't that interested.

Robert