Where I used to work, the decision to use Dell something of a company
policy. I prefer to purchase, build and maintain "clone" machines for the
following reasons:
1) %50 to %75 cost savings for the same or better system.
2) Dell uses proprietary RAM and charges at least 3x the going rate.
3) Dell puts unrealistic (and in my mind, unnecessary) restrictions on the
amount of RAM you can put in a box, killing the one true upgrade path left
in modern computers.
4) Dell short-changes the consumer on DIMM slots: you have to throw out
memory to add more.
5) Dell uses proprietary motherboards with onboard video (and sound in the
case of their desktops).
6) Dell's warrantee/replacement policy is great if something breaks on a
week day between the hours of 5 and 9: otherwise, you're screwed.
Although their phone support is fine (minus the hours on hold with Mozart's
5th), they've never walked into my office to fix anything: I end up doing
all the work anyway. The only time a member of their tech support staff has
told me something I didn't already know, it was because Dell was using a
proprietary setup (RAID card, Motherboard, Video Card, etc.) that I couldn't
find information about anywhere else.
As far as the applications they load on servers before you get them, you can
keep them. The fact that they would even preload so many computer crashing
applications of questionable usefulness onto a server is absolutely
ridiculous. I made a practice of reinstalling NT on Dell's immediately after
I took them out of the box. I find this greatly increases the OS life
expectancy and reduces the crash frequency.
Now, I don't mean to pick on Dell in particular, but their name was
mentioned, and I happen to have quite a bit of experience with their
servers, desktops and support. All in all, Dell is in my mind, the best of
the brand name products, both for servers and for the desktops. And, to give
the Devil his due, I really appreciated their online driver library: I found
it very comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date.
I'll stop ranting now. :)
Benjamin S. Rogers
Web Developer, c4.net
voice: (508) 240-0051
fax: (508) 240-0057
The facts, in my case, are that the 15 percent that I might pay for Dell
over SAG (I couldn't find telenet) is worth it to me, because, over the
past five years, Dell has really stood by their machines. I have purchased
about 50 Dells and speced hundreds. We have had a DOA machine, which was
replaced the next day and we have had machines fail in the last month of
warrantee, but the service has been great. The phone support is also
great, but the best thing, from my perspective, are the setup and
configuration utilities and instructions which ship with the
machines. These save hours on machines with complex setups and greatly
simplify management.
A few years ago we were buying (on the NT side) a mix of IBM, HP, Compaq
and Dell. We whittled it down to just Compaq and Dell and, now, we are
buying Dells almost exclusively.
SAG, BTW, charges about the same price for RAM as Dell
At 11:51 AM 7/27/2000 -0700, you wrote:
--- snip ---
>The savings comes down to the fact that if you build your own, or
>preferably hook up with a company like telenet, you won't pay for the name
>"Dell", which adds about 20% to the price tag.
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