Dell warning!

My company uses HP's mostly but we are in the process of switching to Dells. My server room alone has 47 Dell's. Either PowerEdge 2650's, 2850's or 6850's. I also have a 15 LUN EMC^2 CLARiiON SAN with >17TB of storage which is also Dell. Personally at my desk I have a Dell Precision 380, Dell Precision 450, Dell Precision 340 x2, HP DC7600, HP TC4200, and a few Compaq Evoslows. I also have been buying up those Dell 1905FP's Ultrasharp LCD monitors like hotcakes.

I have some problems with the dells, but its mostly my own stuff like ripping it apart to upgrade it. OR doing a raid 0 with 10k rpm raptor drives.

The only *real* manufacturer part problem I had is that every OEM Maxtor drive in the Dells have failed within 1 year. All have been replaced and work perfectly. I have one optiplex GX270 that was a controller for a robot go completely dead, but in a lab with DMSO and other nasties flying about, I don't doubt it.

but how long have you used these computers. Dells Suck A$$ for the long term. i have used P2 computers from hp, IBM, E-Machines and many others. but ive attempted to use computers of a higher grade from Dell and the HardDisk and/or Bios are currupt. well thats what i have to say about Dell. the other thing i have against Dell is that they use Intel chips

According to my Dell Corporate Sales guy who took me out to lunch today (no joke), they had a problem with the Maxtor drives and they had since stopped using them. Maxtor had denied all liability, but has since "modified" the drives (with a 8% price increase I might add).

As for the BIOS problems, he has never heard of any such complaint. He only oversees Optiplexs, Precisions and PowerEdges so that might be out of his area. As far as I am concerned, I'll buy Dell. I may be biased (or bribed). The possibility of me getting a new dual proc, dual core Precision with a nice 30" flatscreen certainly makes me happy. That sucker is definitely getting 4 36GB 15k rpm Fiber Channel drives in raid 6.

Like I said about two and a half years. I have yet to have a hardware failure on any of them except for one computer that had a hardrive failure prior to my arrival. And oddly it was a Maxtor. Seems to be the general consensus that there was a bad lot of Maxtor drives.

The drives that failed on me were Maxtors, they replaced them with Western Digitals

This is why I never use Maxtors. I had a few WD's fail on me. A few seagates. But never near as many as I have had maxtors that failed.

I run a completley Dell shop, both at my civillian job and in my Navy reserve unit. Failure rate is around 1% for the civillian shop, and 15% for the military unit.

But the military purchased a legion of really cheap systems. I think thats where the failures are comming from.

I bet you are on the NMCI network aren't you?

I was in the same vote.

Yeah, NMCI. I still get shudders just thinking about it.

NMCI is about the biggest waste of money the Navy Marine Corps team has ever spent.

Have 3 dell laptops in the house and love them all! Never had a problem yet! Its the Hp Pavillon that gives me all the problems. Even the 2 other computers I built work better than the Hp.

Well they cost less because they are only putting the minimum components to make the computer run. Usually there is no AGP slots..its all onboard memory..If your power supply goes you have to use "their" model.. which costs more..

Even though it costs less, its a waste of money and its going to cost you more money in the long run. To be honest..anyone who owns a dell should really smarten up and think about what they are buying before they get a Dell. Custom all the way

correction to the previous post.."onboard memory" is suppose to be onboard video.

I would say that Dell's are as good as most other computers for what they are used for (assuming a hardcore gamer isn't going to buy a dell). I think an important factor to consider when thinking of Dell is their warranty policies.

Their warranties where they replace practically every piece of hardware on your machine provided its still under warranty is pretty nice in my opinion.

I just upgraded my Precision 380 from a P4 630 to a P4 D 830. That with my two 10k rpm raptors in raid 0 and 4Gb of memory makes this thing a beast!

She also has a warranty until 2008. Next day on-site service. I have another 380 that I was doing the upgrade with also for a co-worker and his has a finicky psu. Called dell up and within 10 minutes I had a tech scheduled for tomorrow at 10am.