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I just bought a Dell laptop and i am completely satisfied with it. I got a coupon for $500 off a system I custom built. First dell purchase and I have had no problem. Great laptop, fast service, great warrenty (i can drop and they will send a new one). Whats to dislike?
Deb - all of the boxed manufacturers (including Dell) cut corners to bring their box to market at lowest cost. Their consumer line of product and quality of support are pretty much awful. Their business desktop Optiplex line is mediocre - latitude laptops and servers are about the only thing left that I would buy from them.
Case in point - the company president's personal Inspiron laptop had a 3 year extended next day complete care comprehensive warranty. The hard drive failed with bad sectors. The service call to "Jack" (Jehq?) in Bangalore took and HOUR AND A HALF to process and it was plainly clear from the start of the call that I knew more than he did. The same call placed to tech support in Texas would have taken all of five minutes.....
At my last job, I had 4 Optiplex machines under one year old all fail with a combination of bad motherboards and power supplies - same struggles with crappy customer service, and quality issues with bad parts......the last decent machines purchased from them were the Latitude d series back in 2001....
Dell has definitely fallen off since they outsourced tech support. We have a plethora of failures on our Lattitude and Optiplex machines. Granted we have several thousand so there are going to be a few lemons but it seems the overall quality of the components used are lesser. This laptop I'm typing on has an incredibly cheap shell and the optical drive is a joke.
Still having said all that in your situation I'd buy from a company like Dell, Gateway or HP to get the support. If you were a techhie at heart you could build your own and maybe save a few bucks, but then you have to support it.
True Timmah - I've simply accepted it's better to take the chance knowing the machine I build has quality parts and therefore will last. My current machine at home was purchased in 2004 and runs well to this day - my sole issue was with an IDE Array and since I've been running SATA It's been great. I'm still running on the initial install of Windows XP on that box.....
I'm about to switch to a SATA array. I've got a nice case, but I'm going to do a mobo upgrade and probably mod the case a bit so it's been one of those "someday" projects LOL. Bonus comes next Thursday so that'll be a good time to buy a couple drives and convert.
large drives are getting dirt cheap - for the company, we just ordered two poweredge 2900's and will be implementing SATA Raid - two RAID 5 arrays per box. Upgrading both a file and exchange server....
Tim explained my position pretty well. I wouldn't recommend your average Joe get into a custom built machine. Of all the brand names, I still think Dell is a good buy. And they make it fairly idiot proof, which is what most average Joes need.
Dual Core either Intel Core Duo or AMD X2 is the way you want to go for a processor. My personal preference is AMD as I think you get more bang for the buck. Avoid the Pentium M or Sempron processor if buying a notebook.
If you're a gamer ensure the system has a discrete video card (non-integrated). Also buy at least 2GB of RAM. Vista is a memory hog but many programs are getting processor/memory intensive so the more the better.
Specc'ed correctly a machine should last you 3-5 years unless you're an uber power user so don't be too afraid to buy a good one. If you're looking at a specific system and want comments on it post a link here.
My BIL just returned his expensive custom designed DELL something or other model because he paid for a high end processor and they put in a lessor model and then tried to stall him off from sending it back for a full refund.
I was never impressed by DELL and after this story, I will never do biz with them.
He later called HP's customer service with a fake issue to find out how their customer service handled things only to find out their cust. srvc. is every bit as bad as Dell's (if not worse if possible he said).
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