Dell complaints

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

Is Dell risking their staple clients--business and institutional customers--with their shoddy Chinese-poison-dogfood hardware and BIOS? There are indications that they are.

All recent Dell consumer products--Vostro, Inspiron, Dimension, XPS--have had BIOS problems go unresolved through a half dozen revisions. They can't even control the fans, much less the display cards they get at cut rate from nvidia. This is from a compilation of Dell's own site.

Are they selling this same crap to business/institutional? They're all from the same vendor, Foxconn, a notorious hosebag. If they are, and business/institutional experiences the same failure/malfunction rate that consumers report, their relational business will be looking for another vendor, ANY other vendor who can supply their volume, and that's pretty much Lenovo or HP, who have managed to maintain some degree of product integrity while Dell has completely abandoned theirs.

English-language support for business won't pull them out of this. If a third of all new purchases fail within warranty, institutions will abandon Dell with the same fervor individual customers have.
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[incident_man]

I hope you're right, but I'd rather doubt it. If anything, when it comes to expenditures, business always goes with the lowest cost--that's why they hate unions. If workers unionise, it means more labour costs. If DHell continues to be the lowest bidder, it won't matter if the systems fail within warranty because the company won't have to pay for it, provided that DHell actually honours the warranty. Now if, all of a sudden, a business sees mass failures outside of warranty then that would be another story because it would mean added cost.
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Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

[FallenAngel]

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

If you have to buy 4 $600 systems to end up with 3 working ones at any given time, saving $25 off of each one is false economy to the tune of $525 compared to 3 $625 systems that work.

One guy on the Dell board says he always buys two, so that WHEN one quits he'll have parts to substitute to find out what's wrong.
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[benner]

just looking online and seeing desktops for 329 CAD...

4 machines -> 1316 (Dell)
4 machines -> 2400 (Non Dell 600)

50% failure rate almost still works.
methinks they are being aggressive in thier pricing...

just my 2 cents

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

There is not a 2:1 price differential for comparable systems anywhere among the mainstream vendors. The differential was never that large at a given time.

There's a 2:1 differential between what computers cost in 1998 and what they cost now, mitigated by inflation. You have to compare same speeds, same memory, same drive array, same software complement.

Dell's lowball system was 3 chipset-generations obsolete when they were still selling it (Dimension 2400). That's because at that point Intel is selling chipsets at fleamarket prices. You can't compare that to a current-generation system.
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[Ranter]

A retail oil company over here (ireland) recently changed from dell to hp/ibm after they had countless problems with dells machines, not being able to get support and the famous next day warranty. My own office is a telecommunications company which buys half dell half other providers. They used to be all dell but it became a joke when a telecommunications provider couldn't get their computers working to help their own customers. So companies are starting to pay attention

[Apathy]

I agree with Ranter about companies taking notice. I know for a fact that a company in Austin that does remote backups for many businesses and government agencies recently got rid of all of their Dell servers and replaced them with Sun's because of all of the reliability issues they were having with the Dell servers. Now considering that servers are one of Dell's two primary "cash cows" (the other being laptops/notebooks), this little bit of information should be sending up a ton of "red flags" in the minds of many people.
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Q: How do you know Dell Management is lying to you?

A: Until proven otherwise, Assume EVERYTHING coming from Dell Management is a lie.

[Ranter]

I think the NY law suit really opened peoples minds up that they weren't just having a bad experience with dell but this was 'the' experience they would always have!