Don’t buy Dell

In brief, this should sway you from ever thin­king of purcha­sing a Dell machine.

Woe betide my Dell, (Renata’s Blog)

Some quo­tes:
Tech: When you go around the web — yes? On your brow­ser pro­gram. You can run into bad pro­grams called viru­ses. And these viru­ses can cause all the pro­blems you are tal­king about.
Me: I know what a virus is. I don’t have a virus.
Tech: But viru­ses cause all your pro­blems. You have a virus — yes?
Me: I do not have a virus. I have a hard­ware fire­wall on the rou­ter. I have a soft­ware fire­wall on the com­pu­ter. I have up to date com­mer­cial virus pro­tec­tion that upda­tes its defi­ni­tions on the fly and I have sche­du­led full sys­tem virus scans that run every night at 3 AM. I do not have a virus.
Tech: Well, you know, too much secu­rity can cause pro­blems too.

The first tech was ada­mant that the pro­blem was not rela­ted to memory, and that there were only three cau­ses for bluesc­reens: a bad mother­board, a bad hard drive, or soft­ware con­flicts. She explai­ned, again, that she had just repla­ced the mother­board and hard drive. “Must be soft­ware,” the tech said. Exas­pe­ra­ted now, my tech explai­ned that she had just repla­ced the hard drive, so there was no soft­ware on the machine. He still insis­ted it was a soft­ware pro­blem and refu­sed to send memory. In fact, he sug­ges­ted something that I will be wri­ting to Dell about. He actually sug­ges­ted that she ins­tall only one of the four memory modu­les, close the box, deter­mine quickly if that module was okay, and then leave, telling me to con­ti­nue ins­ta­lling Win­dows and call tech sup­port if I had any more pro­blems! He actually sug­ges­ted to her that she LEAVE OUT 1.5 GB of my memory, memory I paid for, pre­su­mably without telling me what had been done.

Engad­get: Dell Lap­tops Exploding…

Dell knew dozens of their lap­tops had sus­tai­ned exten­sive heat damage at least two years before ini­tia­ting any kind of recall. The source, who is clai­med to be someone “close to the com­pany,” has said that Dell execs were pro­vi­ded with docu­ments and pho­to­graphs in 2003 and 2004 sho­wing lap­pies desc­ri­bed as “bur­ned,” “mel­ted” and even “scorched.”