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To: Mike Johnston who wrote (27151)	2/13/2005 9:55:48 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Respond to of 306849

it's not surprising to see quality become more of a problem for computer companies. i remember during the tech bubble Dell was in denial that they would ever sell machines under $1000. but then Dell moved agressively into the consumer market a few years ago and has continued to take market share. consumers mainly care about price, not quality or compatiblity across a network. i think Dell is supposed to provide better components in their business lines, where the users care more about maintainability and are less price-sensitive. i never thought i'd say this but my next machine is probably going to be a Mac.

To: Mike Johnston who wrote (27151)	2/13/2005 7:24:34 PM
From: XBrit	Respond to of 306849

Dell's secret is the same as Walmart's. Squeeze the suppliers to death and pass on the savings. Dell's quality or support is (in my experience) no better or worse than any other PC vendor. It's a commodity business and you get commodity quality/service.

To: Mike Johnston who wrote (27151)	2/14/2005 11:46:48 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

However when i called to order one, they refused to sell it to me since i am not a small business but an individual investor (the ad was running in the newspaper for individual investors) There are laws against selling business machines to home users. For instance, you won't find the high end workstations on the home site because it is illegal for them to sell it to a home user. Sign on as a small business (even if it is run out of your home) and you can buy it. These laws were set up to keep the dual processor Xeon machines (or Itanium machines), which use more energy than the P4s and Celerons, being used by consumers. I have to buy on the high end workstations for my biz. Dual processor Xeon workstations with the best dual DVI video cards, loaded with memory, high speed drives and maxed out with memory. At this end, Dell offers the best bang for the buck. I couldn't build it myself cheaper although I built my own for many years. The difference between full boat and a reduced price can be $1000-1500 on these machines. I agree the low end consumer machines might not be the deal that they appear to be. They are sort of stuck in performance because of the limitations on energy use put on them. About the only other machine I'd consider for what I do would be a high end Mac. This would cost two to three times as much even with many of the parts that are identical like video cards and hard drives. I have one client who has a Dell sitting between two high end Macs, I work onsite for this client. The Macs have had constant support issues, the Dell box has never been cracked except when I added a few extra hard drives. We shut it down once or twice a year to run routine maintenance on it, otherwise its going on four years of up time. I realize this might be unusual, but this has been my experience with my other Dell boxes as well. I've owned every kind of box out there at one time (clones, Compaq, HP, IBM, DEC, Acer and spent half a lifetime running support on Gateways) and I've never had such trouble free hardware as the Dells.