I will relate a very frustrating but true story that makes me not go the route of Dell/Gateway/Emachines/whatever.
I do contract work for local companies that need total support for their network and all the devices on it. I had a customer with a Gateway computer who's dvd drive stopped working. So, I take the model number and go to Gateway to buy a replacement. Guess what, they discontinued it 1 year after he bought it. Plus, they do not sell the dvd drive. So, I go on the internet to find a replacement drive. I ended up buying 9 (thats nine) drives with the proper part number that was supposedly the correct drive for the configuration. Ultimately, the only way I could find one to work was to take the old one apart, find the IC that was the drive controller chip and buy a drive with that chip, then took apart the mechanism and placed it in the old drive case that failed. I bet there were 10 different "recipes" of bill of materials for that Gateway laptop. I am not bashing offshore manufacturing but if you have ever ordered a dell or gateway from their website, you can see that even the model numbers have submodel and subsubmodel numbers. Do each of these subsubmodels have a different motherboard? In many cases yes. Do they shift the recipe as time marches on to get the best profit out of each unit? Of course they do. So as one part goes up and another goes down in price, their JIT manufacturing processes take advantage. You should read Michael Dell's management book, its a great book for businessmen. But, the biggest metric he uses for the success of his operation is what he calls Velocity. This is the speed of implementing something new. For that desktop, if something changes (new chip, different price break, etc.) how quickly can he go from decision to change something until the first unit with that change is shipped to a customer. His goalis in 2-4 days! You just don't know whats under the hood when you buy these boxes other than they are usually good deals and work well as a family/general business computer. Neal Campbell Abroham Neal Software www.abrohamnealsoftware.com www.sdrsystems.com (540) 242 0911 On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Ray Andrews, K9DUR<k9...@rnacs.com> wrote: > Alan, > > You wrote, "...two months later people are buying that same model but...." > > Two months is probably way too long a timeframe. The company I retired from > tried to lock onto a specific model of PC for the production floor. For a > while we were buying Compaq. Often, no two PC's in the same shipment had > the same hardware, even though they had identical model numbers. This was > simply not acceptabler from a maintenance standpoint. > > When I retired, we were buying Dell & had been able, for the most part, to > specify a particular hardware configuration which stayed fairly stable. > Although there was no guarantee that we would be able to get that same > configuration in the next order. At least they were consistent within > shipments. > > By-the-way, we were also specifying Windows 2000 for all production floor > PC's right up until the time Microsoft told Dell they couldn't continue > shipping Win2k. However, we had kept a disk image, so we were able to > install Win2k on the machines that were coming in with XP. We found Win2k > to be much more stable than XP in a production floor environment. > > 73, Ray, K9DUR > http://k9dur.info > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > FlexRadio Systems Mailing List > FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz > http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz > Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ > Knowledge Base: http://kc.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: > http://www.flex-radio.com/ > Message delivered to nealk...@gmail.com > _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kc.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/ Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
