On Mon, 2006-12-11 at 22:17 -0700, Jonathan Duncan wrote: > > Now that's quite a story. And typical of Dell from my experience. We > > no longer deal directly with Dell at all. We use En Pointe and let them > > extract the money from Dell for repairs. > > > > If you have that much trouble with a company, why continue to use them?
We have two choices here. Dell or HP. Need I say more? :) I used to have a student working for me that claimed we could save lots of money by just building computers. The economics of it escaped him. Fortunately our experiences with Dell are just barely good enough that as long as En Pointe will come on-site at Dell's expense, it's a win-win situation. If things get worse I may look at HP, but no one in my shop seems to like them, for reasons that are purely subjective. We do recommend Apple to our faculty, but unfortunately Apple has decided to ignore that part of the market that we are in. They simply have no machines to compete with, say a Dell GX 745. This is also unfortunate for my brother, a college student, who wants to do video production. There's just no Apple machine that fits his bill. The Mac Mini is of course a toy for this kind of thing. The iMac is fine except that it already comes with its own screen and no room for hard drive growth (I know about firewire). Plus it's 30% more expensive than the equivalent Dell setup. The Mac Pro is overkill for him and seems to start at $2500 anyway. By contrast, for example, we're picking up Dell boxes with 2 GB of RAM, a Core 2 duo processor, decent video card, and 20" LCD display for only about $1200. If Apple had a $1200 machine to compete with that, we'd only buy apple (even for users wanting XP). Maybe a mini Mac Pro, for example (MacPros are monsters). Until this happens, Apple will only be supplying laptops and the occasional iMac to our university department. Well and the occasional server. Michael > > Jonathan > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
