New Dell laptop

Filed in Thoughts on February 18, 2010



After the dog spilled coffee into my laptop a few weeks ago, I have been looking for a new one (laptop, not dog).  After trying a refurbished Dell and sending it back twice because of numerous problems, I just bought a new one which came a day or so ago.

Why Dell? It is just that my office is full of Dells and the components are interchangeable.  So, when the hard drives, batteries, and power cords inevitably fail a few days out of warranty, we have extra parts lying around to get through another day.  Yes, I would like a Mac, but it would just be a lot of trouble to deal with for our tech guys.

I don't pretend to need a fancy, high-end laptop, so I ended up buying at the low end as usual.  I got a Inspiron with Dual Core and 4 megs of RAM.  Even that would be overkill for me, but I do some video work and that requires a bit more power and memory.

My impression of this laptop is that it is junk that might last a year.  Dell has been on a quest to squeeze every dime out of production costs for some time, and they are clearly getting quite good at it.  This machine has cheap plastic parts that don't even fit together well.  The plastic piece that frames the screen is especially ridiculous.  It feels and fits like a low quality toy.

Unfortunately, I had to spend some time with their loosely-called technical support.  If they squeeze every dime out of production costs, they squeeze every penny out of support costs.  I may have been talking to someone in India, but based on his communication skills, he might as well have been from Venus.  After trying three times to spell my name and six times to give him the service code for the laptop, I hung up in disgust.

But, the laptop only cost $500 or so and I suppose you get what you pay for.  Just for your information, if you want a Dell, it is probably worth the extra money to step up to their Studio, which feels much more substantial.  But even the Studio is junk when compared to the Lenovo machine my dog assassinated. 



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8/6/2010 5:00:07 PM

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