Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog



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Fark Garlicster Metafilter Plastic The Register SciFi Daily Sexblogs Slashdot Space.com The Smoking Gun Zeropaid [ CARTOONS ] Corrigan Children of the Atom Fiona Smyth Maakies MacKay MNFTIU.cc Secret Lair Smell of Steve [ VARIETY HOUR ] B3TA Hoogerbrugge Milk & Cookies Mumbleboy Onion Rathergood XE [ RERUNS ] [ 2005 ] JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH APRIL MAY JUNE JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER OCTOBER [ 2004 ] MAY JUNE JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER [ 2002 ] [ 2003 ]	Thursday, October 06, 2005 !!! JUMP ALERT !!! This morning I suffered through another computer incident, the third this year. It looks like Dell has jumped the shark. I've read anecdotes about similar experiences on blogs like Jeff Jarvis' and Maria's. Those combined with my own experience seem to confirm a trend. From now on, buy Dell at your own risk. Here's a bit of my history with their machines. My current box is at least the sixth Dell machine I've worked on and the third I've owned as you can see in the pic below: Several years ago, I worked for a client who used to buy cheap PC clones and those machines were always messing up and having issues. There was a Dell in the office and I started using it and found it extremely reliable in comparison to the others (and what a machine, it had two hard drives with a combined 1Gb of memory!). After an incident when the Dell survived some serious abuse from a rogue tech guy, I was impressed enough to get one for home. Then a second one a couple of years later. I worked on two other Dells at the client site. My first two machines -- both work just fine today -- took a lot of abuse and but were/are very reliable. I started recommending Dell to clients and when they'd ask me about their tech support, I would tell them that I bought those machines so it would be less likely that I'd need tech support, 'cause they were so tough. And reliable. All I care about is reliable. This third machine is a different story. From the very start, something about it seemed off but I couldn't put my finger on it. Keyboards would stop working ... then start again, the cd drives seemed unstable ... the computer just 'felt' shakey. Last February (less than a year since the machine arrived) I had my first major incident when the computer went through some sort of frenzied self-repair routine that lasted a couple of days (this was preceded by a keyboard failure and the sound card becoming disabled). At the end, the system seemed to fix itself but I lost a huge whack of files. I was heading into a busy season and needed my machine, so I did a full back up and worked through it and everything seemed relatively back to normal. Then, in August the same thing, only this time the hard drive was fried and I lost all my data after the February backup. I know, I know, I should have been backing up regularly ... but before this I had 6 incident-free years on multiple machines! Over the past week, the warning signs have returned ... the keyboard stopped and started, the monitor cut out and today the whole machine went wacky. It seems to have calmed down now, but I spent the afternoon backing up everything in anticipation of another collapse. And this isn't one of their discount machines, this is a top-of-the-line XPS Dimension thingama-bobber. I bought the premium machine because I wanted it to be reliable like the others. If reliable is the bright centre of the universe, this machine is the farthest thing from it. So that's my story. And I'm stuck with this junk for another two years. I've really enjoyed my old computers but I have no love for this one. Consider yourselves warned! 3:43 PM , # , \|