Never buying DELL stuff again....

[electroplated]

Up to a point, as these are work computers, it's not really such a big deal - as already mentioned we probably budgeted to replace them every 3/4 years anyway.

However, I really really won't EVER be buying a Dell for myself after this experience (the Dell support was fine, but not as fast as it could have been), I'm just in the process of building a pc for home use and am very glad I decided to build it myself and not go for a Dell 'bargain'...

 

[WouldBe]

It's nearly never the CPU for office type apps, but people just look at the 2.8Ghz Celeron! (wooo!) and ignore the 256mb of RAM (including 64mb shared video RAM), which means your computer's going to run about as fast as a quadraplegic sloth.

However by buying a machine with a faster CPU you (conincidentally) get more RAM, which makes your machine faster, of course thanks to Intel we know that only the clock speed matters ( ) so most customers dont' realise that it's the RAM that's the problem and so demand faster CPUs which have a higher profit margin on than RAM.

Programing in a real language would sort that problem out.

A simple 'for...next' loop in machine code = 4 bytes of code, the same loop written in Basic and compiled = 17K bytes.

 

[Radar]

Yeah, but how many people can still code in 80x86 assembler ?? I doubt many coders under the age of 40 have ever needed to in the real world (not uni projects).

Anyhow real programmers use tasm Does it still exist ?

 

[Iam]

I've found that Dell's business support was UTTERLY appalling until about a year ago - I think they realised that they had a terrible reputation and tried to turn it all around. To be fair, I think they have. My dealings with them recently about server hardware issues have been fine, and they've actually bent over backwards to help.

My experiences of a fairly huge desktop contract a few years back (must be... 4-6 years, I suppose) was honestly attrocious.

"I've got a machine here that won't power up."
"Ok, have you tried booting from the resource CD?"
"No, because the machine won't power up."
"Well, in order to proceed, I need you to follow the troubleshooting steps on the resource CD."

*dull sounds of head repeatedly hitting desk*

That would have been a good call to them. It was just a disaster (regularly took months to get hardware issues sorted), especially considering the extended support money they'd been paid. Course, I've since wised-up that it's not so much them as the nature of that type of support which is the problem there, AOL call-centre syndrome. A two week training course = a support engineer. Not leaving after 6 weeks = senior support engineer.

Most of our Dells where I now work are either legacy machines, which will eventually be replaced with HPs on the desktop (I have no more faith in them, of course, but I have no expectations either) and servers - only one Dell server left and it's a PowerEdge, which I don't think has ever been down.

Their server support was better, I seem to remember and our SysAdmin is happy with what he was getting from them, but the manager prefers HP. The laptops are still Dells, and they are miles ahead of equiv. HP kit. Mind you, we spec them correctly. I haven't had a single laptop warranty call in nearly 18 months with a Dell machine. *touches wood*

The users do the inital calls for the desktops that're left these days, as they're with the machines - in remote offices. I *can't* call them... Gutted.

 

[pk]

You bought Dell machines to use with video???

Next time, choose wisely...

 

[electroplated]

You bought Dell machines to use with video???

Next time, choose wisely...[/IMG]

Sorry PK, this time it needed to be PCs and the Dells were the best spec we could find for our budget - we were dealng with huge amounts of .wmv source footage, which at the time (correct me if I'm wrong) could ONLY be edited on a PC natively (using Vegas video software), no other program would handle it, especially macs. We were under immense time pressure so there was no room to convert the wmv's first before dropping them into avid/final cut etc, otherwise we would have done so.

I'd have love to have filled the room with shiney G5's but they would have been useless for this particular job.


Also, a mac mini like in your picture would not really be up to the job, would it!

 

[DG55]

Mac mini for video? You must be foolish.

 

[felixthecat]

Never had a problem myself. Got a 4 year old Dell desktop which I'm about to change just because, and I've got an 8 year old Dell laptop that still works fine - admittedly not the fastest machine on the planet but has been abused and ill treated and still is perfectly adequate for the kids to do homework on.

I however, *heart* my lovely Toshiba Satellite

 

[Iam]

I however, *heart* my lovely Toshiba Satellite

If it's an 1110, there's a spare battery looking for a home in the recycle forum.

 

[pk]

Mac Minis wouldn't have been up to the task, no, I thought the image was of a shiny G5... fair comment about the wmv files too - though why anyone would want to encode in that disgusting format is beyond me...

 

[electroplated]

Mac Minis wouldn't have been up to the task, no, I thought the image was of a shiny G5... fair comment about the wmv files too - though why anyone would want to encode in that disgusting format is beyond me...

It's beyond me aswell, but that's the only format they would give us (video source of champions league football no less). the mind boggles

 

[electroplated]

Now for some good news!

Dell have just been in touch and have, after some pestering. agreed to replace ALL the motherboards in the office!!! yes, 20 in total... result!

(but whilst this make me think their customer service has improved, I will NOT be replacing these machines with more Dells further down the line.)

 

[tomvill]

yeh, thats a problem i sometimes have is projects are given to me in wmv which is in my opinion the WORST file format along with wma, so im alwayse reconverting and bla bla to get the job done, and im not eaven useing a new mac, its about 7 years old, but with the students 'budget' i can only afford to upgrade, anyway if you ever get to the stage of throwing out thoes dells im interested in getting hold of one which will be realy usefull, ...... looking back on it "champions league" thats on tv rite, so wouldent a dv stream or a tv quality mp4 stream be the format to distributre that in??

 

[electroplated]

thats on tv rite, so wouldent a dv stream or a tv quality mp4 stream be the format to distributre that in??

Contractually, we were only allowed to use the source they provided over ip, which was in WMV format, already edited down to highlights clips (which we have to do voice over, add bumpers and crop etc before encoding to about a million different 'proper' formats)