Dell complaints

[JMunroe]

My computer from Dell has never worked correctly. It's a Dimension 2450 (a number they gleefully claim never existed). From the start I got slow response from the most trivial things... the Start Menu actually lagged when you clicked the Start Button. The video card (some unknown by Intel) was awful. The audio drivers would uninstall themselves randomly and the sound would go off on a whim during normal use, even in the middle of a session. A DVD-ROM device added later produced only choppy video and distorted audio (audio was badly distorted across all formats when the computer was first started up) and eventually the drive became unusable altogether. The computer was prone to constant lockups, forgetting important settings, and performing miles below its stats. It also claimed six gigabytes of my hard disk and pretended they didn't exist. The XP install disc, my only means of reformatting, gave a corruption error when I tried to boot from it to run the install program.

To make a long story short: My father and I booted from HIS XP install disk and reformatted/reinstalled the operating system. With everything wiped and the OS reinstalled, the computer runs beautifully. Flawlessly. Better than it did the first time I turned it on.

Simple fact: DELL SHIPPED ME A COMPUTER THAT WAS IMAGED AMATEURISHLY.
Simple fact: DELL SHIPPED ME A WINDOWS XP INSTALL DISC THAT WAS CORRUPTED.

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

It was imaged scurrilously. The lower you buy on Dell's price structure, the more they pack it with bloatware for which they get paid a couple bucks from the author (usually some marketer). Then the bare-bones machine has to resort to swap-filing just to open the 'start' menu. Glad that's resolved for you.

XP disk have any surface blemishes, scratches, scuffs? The whole 'CD' thing was marketed originally to replace vinyl, saying "it doesn't scratch like records do". No, it scratches WORSE. Scratched vinyl may skip in one spot. Scratched optical disks may not work at all. Any time something is being 'marketed' to you, be-f*cking-ware.
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[JMunroe]

The CD wasn't scratched at all... it was spick and span. It just didn't work for reinstalling. You can imagine how irritated I was when my dad's worked just fine...