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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Meathead who wrote (151497)	1/17/2000 2:39:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Meathead - I did look at that stuff, and at first I felt the same as you - but the wording which says "Eligible for FREE Upgrade to Windows 2000 Professional in some regions" just refers to the MSFT upgrade program, not hardware certification. As I said in my post to Jim, some Dimension and Optiplex products are certified, the Precision workstation line is not. take a look at dell.com which says Below you will find the Dell systems that are certified participants in this program: and lists the models I discussed in my first post. Below that it says Dell is in the process of testing the other recommended systems for Windows 2000 Professional, and will add to this list as testing and certification are completed. Please check back for further information. After posting to Jim, I spoke with a buddy of mine at MSFT about how the certification process works. He said that vendors submit a product to a series of tests - the "HCT" - and then MSFT sends back a list of things which are not in compliance and the vendor addresses the issues until the HW passes, then it goes on the certified list on the website. The certification program has been running for more than a year and products started going up on the site in August, when the "RC3" candidate was released (this is the same code as is going to manufacturing now). He had no comment on DELL certified products except to say "that's all they put through the certification to date"... So while I agree that there is a lot of material about Win2K on the DELL site (a fair amount of it is from the MSFT site BTW), that's the easy part - a good technical marketing person could gather that material. I would also assume that DELL's products will pass the certification. I assume that's what they mean by "recommended configuration" but that's not the same as certified. The question is why DELL did not go through the certification process with more products? If the products are not on the MSFT list, MSFT support will not provide assitance to customers who call with an OS problem... they will refer the customer to the hardware vendor. It seems a little half-hearted not to have pretty much the whole line certified after 6 months... That was my original question to Jim Kelley when he talked about 8 days selling Win2K workstations this quarter... if they are not on the certification list, it certainly places a barrier to their purchase in comparison to products which ARE on the list, don't you think? I don't think this is a "red flag" issue but it does surprise me. Jim's response does not, his first thought is shoot the messenger, then read the message...