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

To: stock bull who wrote (166670)	8/30/2001 7:02:51 PM
From: Meathead	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

Re: Looks like we are going into the teens. Looks like I might pick up a few shares<g>. Major components like video cards are from the same vendor. Other things like memory qualification can have an impact. 128MB sticks are all the same right? Sort of. Some are marginal within a particular system and you'll just hang and reboot a little more often but not know what to blame it on. There are lots of areas that a vendor can cut costs which are transparent to the consumer, and in most cases, it doesn't matter. Everyone is cutting costs to the bone and Dell is no stranger to that game. The key is cutting in the right areas so as not to impact your field failure rate and damage your reputation as well as your balance sheet. But that's nearly impossible to do. Believe it or not, new PC's have problems within the first 30 days more often than people realize. The rate is about 3% for consumer desktops for most vendors. Dell's Optiplex line has outstanding quality with less than 1% failure rate which is the best in the biz. Notebooks on the other hand are problematic. Some vendors see failures and returns in the 5% or greater range. So quality components along with good engineering and good qualification and test are paramount to not getting killed on warranty costs. And as a consumer, I hate to order something, wait for it, unpack it, set it up, spend hours testing it only to find a problem and have to box it up and ship it back. When you buy a notebook (from almost anybody), there's a 1 in 20 chance that this will happen... not great odds. In fact, it seems that about one third of all the electronic stuff I buy today, be it from Best Buy, Circuit City, off the internet etc. has some sort of problem where I have to return the piece of crap. What a hassle! The quality of stuff these days stinks. Gateway's pricing may be tempting on some models but consider this. Would you buy into a 3 year warranty from a company who probably won't be around that long? But then again it's still a crapshoot. Maybe it's worth saving a couple hundred bucks since it's impossible to quantify the risk no matter who you buy from. If it works fine for the first 30 days, the odds are great that it will work for the next 3 years (remember the old bathtub curve?). MEATHEAD