Would you recommend buying a Dell?

[ChingChang]

hmm there are more "yes" than I thouught.

I would say no, unless there are good deals on laptop.

 

[tthiel]

Yeah but 20% yes for the dominant PC manufacturer in the U.S. is still pretty pathetic...

 

[tthiel]

Why would you compare a Dell server to Sun? Which model Dell and Sun are you comapring?? Sparc or Opteon on the Sun? It's apples and oranges...we have been buying the Sun Opterons which will spank any comparable Dell Intel server hard btw.

Server? Yes. Half the price of Sun, on average 20-30% less than other major manufacturers. Things fixed NOW when they need to be.
Workstation? Yes. Rant below.
Gaming Rig? No. Build it yourself and save money.
Cheapo-neato-web-browser? Yes. Like so many others have said, it's a disposable system.
Laptop? Maybe. I've seen good, and I've seen bad. For the price, they're decent machines.
Monitor? You can have my 2405FPW when you pull it from my cold, dead fingers.

I worked at a university supporting 3000 Dell and Gateway machines. (About 80% Dell). We always had three or four in the cube needing repairs, but it was mostly virus/spyware related. I can recall three specific instances where hardware failed - One hard drive failure (Maxtor 80GB SATA), one motherboard failure (busted capacitor), and catastropic PSU failure (took out mobo, proc, ram, and hdd). There may have been more, but that's what I dealt with. We purchased Optiplex's exclusively, and 1/1000 failure rate is perfectly acceptable in my book. Our contract had us talking to a US Dell rep inside 10 minutes, and new components overnighted, with a tech to install them, should we so choose.

The students also had a lot of Dells, the cheapo kind. ALWAYS being brought in with spyware. There was a few computers that just randomly died, mostly things-being-yoinked-out problems, or overheating from lack of cleaning, or soda stains telling the tale. The software normally died before the hardware did, though.

My vote? Depends on the circumstances.

 

[tthiel]

I bought an E510 for a friend, reformatted the drive and reinstalled Windows Home from scratch. Nice little system for the price with LCD monitor. I just hope it lasts. It has a small power supply btw so I don't know about putting an X800 GTO in it.

I say Maybe Yes because it really is a gamble. I just ordered my Dell E510 and for about a couple weeks now, it is running like a charm and I HOPE it continues on for another couple years. Hense the 2 year warranty. Pop the X800GTO in tonight and it will be a gamer machine. But again, even in resellerratings and other sites, opinions are mixed with Dell systems. You just HOPE that your machine won't be the one that is messed up.

 

[Tarff]

Yeah but 20% yes for the dominant PC manufacturer in the U.S. is still pretty pathetic...

Personally I'd say that was pretty good for a hardware enthusiast message board, expected it to be much lower, personally.