Rant----Dell

I have a Dell laptop for work that has been working flawlessly for the past 4-5 years. However, the IT department has informed me that I've been "out of coverage" since early 2016 and they want to get me one of the HP laptops that the rest of the company has been getting. I'm one of the last holdouts on the Dell, because it just works. It's not the lightest, thinnest, or fastest by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't have to fight teething issues with my programs or figure out a new OS (the new HPs only come with Windows 10). I'm sure I'll be thrown into the mix in the next month or two, but I certainly don't look forward to fixing what wasn't broken, lol. All that said, the Dell has been a decent laptop, and I've got a Dell desktop at home that I threw some upgraded parts in which has been pretty good for 3+ years of light home-use. I've owned two HP desktops from 2001-2012 or so which did their job for 5-6 years each until it was time to upgrade. I honestly haven't had a "bad" computer.
 
Good experience, bad experience, it's just the luck of the draw for consumer-grade desktops and laptops. The parts are generally fairly low quality, and the construction is "mass production". Crap shoot. . .try Consumers Report before buying, but it's still pretty much blind chance. . .
 
Flyby44 said:
My dell is still running strong. Must be because I don't use it that often. My Toshiba is a warrior though. I've had it for 7 years and still running good.
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Toshiba had lighter and thinner laptops than modern MacBooks and PeeCee clones of same, back in the 90s. They made some amazing hardware for the time. I had a Portege 3015CT (usually branded the 3010CT) back when those came out and it was still operable nearly two decades after purchased new, when it got recycled. It had Windows 95 back then and eventually got a custom load of Debian Linux put on it. Hadn't thought of them as an option for a modern machine.

HP announced some really nice gear at CES this week. Really nice. Various form factors and what not. They made their "thin" lineup slightly thicker (3mm) to get 3 hours more average battery time inside of some models to push them back up to 12+ hours. 4K monitor now standard, too, and an MSRP with a fast i7, smallish SSD, and 16GB of RAM below $1300.

Headed the right direction there vs Apple cutting their battery life to 6 at beat in the silly quest for thinness... at more than double the price.

The Portege did 6 hours in the early 90s and nobody was using lithium ion batteries even back then. Just a blob of NiCD or NiMH cells in a detachable chunk on the back of the thing barely thicker than the laptop itself.
 
register@teamandras.com said:
Just curious, DenverPilot, why do folks use "PeeCee" instead of PC?
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It's a derogatory term originating from Apple fanboy culture. "Pee"Cee.

Haven't heard it in years until Denver started using it again. I think mostly because PeeCee nowadays refers to Priyanka Chopra. But doubt that's what Denver had in mind. If it was Sac Arrow, then maybe :).
 
register@teamandras.com said:
Just curious, DenverPilot, why do folks use "PeeCee" instead of PC?
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deonb said:
It's a derogatory term originating from Apple fanboy culture. "Pee"Cee.

Haven't heard it in years until Denver started using it again. I think mostly because PeeCee nowadays refers to Priyanka Chopra. But doubt that's what Denver had in mind. If it was Sac Arrow, then maybe :).
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Nah I never saw it used as derogatory. I'm so old a real "PC" was made by IBM so a bunch of us used "PeeCee" to refer to clones.

Typing habit I guess. IBM sold out to Lenovo a long time ago.

Same reasons, I never called them "Windows" machines because I remember when there were multiple OSs that were all viable running on PeeCee hardware. Heck even IBM had OS/2 as a going thing back then.

I just moved 55,000 saved emails from my iCloud account back into GSuite set up with one of my domain names. As I was digging out of curiosity to see what useful stuff I've kept over the years and how much of it just needed to be deleted, I found a newsletter from Netscape. :)
 
I'm using a Lenovo that I've had for several years. Old enough that it still has the "swizzle stick" in the middle of the keyboard (which I love). My other laptop, which I put into service almost two years ago, is also a Lenovo. Both have been good, solid machines. I had to replace the hard drive in this machine last year as the old one was dying. Fortunately, my son had access to hardware that made cloning simple. Except that the new drive is a 1 TB and the old one was around 500 MB, so I now have two partitions. The older one started out as a Windows 7 machine and I would have been quite happy to leave it as such, but MS did an automatic "upgrade" when I wasn't looking.

My wife uses a Dell that I got a year and a half ago. It replaced a Lenovo that was falling apart. The Dell was given to me when I retired from Intel, and I wasn't expecting it. A 13 inch with an i7 processor. Great laptop. I had to replace it's power adapter this month as the cord was breaking at the connector to the computer. Not sure how much of that was the fault of the cord and how much was the fault of my wife. $59 plus shipping. Annoying, but...

I haven't dealt with customer service, other than to get confirmation that I was ordering the right power brick for the Dell. And that worked fine.
 
Ghery said:
I'm using a Lenovo that I've had for several years. Old enough that it still has the "swizzle stick" in the middle of the keyboard (which I love). My other laptop, which I put into service almost two years ago, is also a Lenovo. Both have been good, solid machines. I had to replace the hard drive in this machine last year as the old one was dying. Fortunately, my son had access to hardware that made cloning simple. Except that the new drive is a 1 TB and the old one was around 500 MB, so I now have two partitions. The older one started out as a Windows 7 machine and I would have been quite happy to leave it as such, but MS did an automatic "upgrade" when I wasn't looking.
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Lenovo still offers the center nub joystick thing, and it's great for real touch typists and folks who know better than to move their fingers off of the keyboard and reach for a mouse, when a keyboard shortcut is available.

I probably shouldn't share this, but it's funny... a co-worker used to call that thing the "clit mouse". LOL.

On your multiple partition thing, if the BIOS can handle a 1TB drive it didn't need to be two partitions, but it is a nice way to segregate data from OS so an OS can be reinstalled without data loss.

If you really want it one big partition though, there's pretty easy ways to do that if you get your stuff off of the second one temporarily first, and again, if the BIOS supports the larger drive. Free software even.

We use similar free software and a cheap external SATA disk bay to USB to clone stuff all the time. About $15 invested. Maybe $20.

The surprise Win 10 upgrade thing was kinda rude of MSFT, but lots of people had that happen. Turns out Win 10 isn't that awful, but force upgrading an OS is definitely bad behavior.
 
deonb said:
I'm waiting for my 4th Dell laptop replacement in the last 2 months.

1) Ordered a Precision Xeon laptop initially -> kept bugchecking the moment you put heavy load on it.
2) Replaced with another Precision Xeon laptop -> arrived DOE.
3) Replaced with an Alienware laptop -> arrived with the wrong graphics card
4) Waiting for Alienware laptop #2 hopefully with the correct graphics card...
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My saga continues...

That 4) Alienware laptop #2 from above arrived -> again with the wrong graphics card.

Dell must have spent $500 on FedEx in the last few months just shipping laptops to and from my house.
 
deonb said:
My saga continues...

That 4) Alienware laptop #2 from above arrived -> again with the wrong graphics card.

Dell must have spent $500 on FedEx in the last few months just shipping laptops to and from my house.
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Wow! How unimpressive! You could have built your own computer from raw materials by now. lol
 
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