My I HATE DELL Rant

I don't really "hate" Dell, but I just don't really like their computers. If they weren't so successful at what they did, I could happily ignore them and live a fulfilled life. However, they are the Wal-Mart of computing, so somewhat inescapable for someone like me who take on all comers (in computer for that is).

So, what do I mean, Wal-Mart of computing? Well, they are everywhere for one, so you can't really get away from them. If you work on people's computers like I do (even in your spare time), you're going to see them. Other than the ones I put out there, Dells are the single most common computer that I see. Just in the last month I've worked on 1 desktop and 3 laptops. OK, one was my fault since I ordered it, but that's a different story. What wrong with them then if people buy them. It's the commoditization of computers and they (along with HP) are the companies that are most responsible. Much like the stuff you get at Wal-Mart, what you get will get the job done, not elegantly, not particularly efficiently and it won't last very long, but it gets it done.....if you don't expect it to last.

Therein lies the issue. Computer companies like Dell and HP design their products to do one thing: MAKE MONEY. It's the Roger Smith (CEO of GM during the late 70's and early 80's) philosophy of business. In an interview, Mr. Smith (an accountant by the way) was being grilled by media on why GMs car designs were so bad compared to the Europeans and Japanese, his response was: "General Motors is not in the business to make cars, it's in the business to make money". There you have it.

If you didn't tear into various brands of computers on a regular basis like I do, you probably wouldn't notice and you'd be like the typical consumer. Go down and buy a laptop, use it for 3 years or so, then throw it away when it starts to run poorly. That's what most people do with cars isn't it? However, I'm in the business of restoring these machines to their original usefulness so I get to rebuild and often upgrade the components.

No, generally, I work on ThinkPads. These are special and I don't mean in a driving a BMW sort of way, but more like how a mechanic feels when he opens the hood up. You come to the realization that these things are designed to last a long time and to be kept up, so some engineer put some thought into what would happen if you had to work on it. This is not how Dells (along with most other brands) are made. They take the more Japanese car maker approach; it'll drive very nicely for a long time, then you get rid of it and get a new car. Witness that there is virtually no used car market in Japan.

Anyway, so what makes me say this about Dell. Well first of all, a Latitude D600 laptop that I had worked on came back to me last week with the second occurrence of a weird problem that's unusual for a relatively new OS load. It had a corrupt NT Boot Loader file, which causes Windows to get stuck on load and never get to the desktop. The data is there, just the Windows won't boot. The typical reason for this issue is a very old load that's too broken to fix itself, or a nasty virus/malware infestation that had broken that file. This machine has/had neither of those.....either time, so it had to be something else. While I was researching another Dell for somebody else, I came across a forum post talking about the 137Gb HDD limit in the BIOS. I thought; no, that couldn't be it since I regularly worked on ThinkPads of the same vintage and chipset that had no trouble with big hard drives. In fact I had used this exact same model of HDD in several machines for different people (WD 250Gb/5400rpm) in various ThinkPads and even an Acer. But I got onto the Dell support forum and ask some questions and sure enough, the answer I got was that; even with the newest BIOS versions, you can't have a boot partition bigger than 137Gb or you'll have issues! HOLY CRAP, what that means is that the limitation isn't in the chipset, but that someone at Dell decided that it wasn't cost effective to have somebody write a new BIOS version that address the issue.

THAT'S SO CLASSIC "BEAN COUNTER" MENTALITY!!!

You wanna bet that'll effect my future decisions on what to buy? Yup; don't care how cool the design is, and they have some great designs (eg. M1330), I'm not buying a machine from them!

Oh, yeah; my other case? I've been tasked with finding a "new" laptop for a friend's daughter who's about a year out of college. So her big clunky Dell Inspiron 1000 was just not cutting it. I won't even get into why that machine is a bad design to start with. What she wanted was something that's smaller than her parent's ThinkPad R52/15" that was going to be easier for her to travel with. So basically, I needed to find something; sub-five-pounds, that had all the drives built-in, but big enough for her to do the regular stuff on. IBM/Lenovo had/has nothing that fits that description other than the very recent X300/301 which didn't fit in her $300-350 budget. After about a week of research and finally deciding that acceptable Sony's didn't fit the budget either, I settled on the Dell 700/710m.

This machine had all the right specs, Pentium M/2.0Ghz processor, up to 1.5Gb of RAM, built-in DVD Burner, 12.1" aspect high-res screen. What's not to like? Given the budget, I had to settle for an older machine which meant that it didn't have DDR2 support or SATA HDD. I can live with that since I had a stick of !Gb DDR/333 sitting around that I could bump the RAM with, and a big 250Gb for it, although, I'd have to get around that 137Gb HDD limit in the BIOS......grrrr.

However, my gripe isn't with that, but with how the thing is constructed. The machine I bought was in decent shape, but had a chipped place on the keyboard bezel. "No big deal", I thought; I'll just buy another one and slap that right on. I've taken KB bezels off of dozens of ThinkPads. HAHA says Michael Dell's accounts (who apparently are in charge of the engineers)! I end up having to remove the screen, disconnecting 2 plugs, pulling the attendant wires out, including the WiFi leads, along with the expected keyboard. On top of that, the touchpad (device of the devil) was in better shape on the old bezel so I figured I'd move it. HAHA says the accounts again; "I shall taunt you again, English k-nigets"!!! The touchpad isn't a module, it's 3 separate pieces, one of which is attached to the bezel itself with melted plastic studs! So I advanced to the rear and the swap was not made.

Hey; otherwise, I love those Dells!