Yeah, it seems Dell has stopped using proprietary parts only recently.
Dell have long been known to be picky about memory, but there are plenty of alternative sources.
But I suggest that the OP goes to a local PC builder and has a good long chat about what exactly he wants. Don’t forget about things like how much noise is tolerable. There are plenty of quieter components. You can even get self-contained fluid-cooling units these days, which help in that regard. What about being transportable? Small?
Dell has NEVER made memory.
Well, if it’s been running gremlin free for 2 months you are almost certainly going to be fine. My point is this: Dell/HP/Sony etc. all build tens of thousands of machines in each configuration they sell. The simple act of repetition and testing make it less likely that two of the components they choose will have an unexpected conflict. When you homebuild you buy a mobo that is built to take perhaps 10 different speeds of CPUs, hundreds of GPUs, hundreds of memory brands and configurations and a variety of PSUs at different ratings. Some of these components might not even have been available on the market when the mobo was designed. There are literally tens of millions of combinations that a homebuilder might put together, most of which were never specifically tested or planned for. That type of extensibility and customizability by it’s nature makes unexpected issues a fact of life.
Well, I omitted the act of getting the physical parts from the calculation because this is going to be an issue whether you warranty it or do it yourself. If you are getting a warranty repair you typically need to get an RMA, package and mail the part/machine back and wait for them to send it to you. If you do it yourself, you either find a physical store that sells the part or you order it from Newegg and get it shipped in 2 or 3 days. In all cases that’s faster than a warranty service. The act of installing the part is trivial, that was the point I was making. If you are truly worried about downtime, doing it yourself is fastest always.
Not proprietary, but also not something you can walk into any computer shop and pick up, availability online is irrelevant when you are staring at a dead computer.
1% hahah, if they had a 1% failure rate I wouldn’t have a business. You do realize most big name mail order systems undergo zero testing at the plant. The customer is the first one to turn them on and plenty of them dont turn on or die in a few days.
Such occurences in professionally built machines are so small as to be insignificant. Home builders are prone to gremlins due to older bios versions and or drivers using the ones that came on the disk rather than the latest available.
If it is under factory warranty, I replace it immediately and let the mfr send me another part.
Unfortunately navigating the minefeild of proprietary bullshit is difficult even for very computer saavy users.
Things like:
The front panel jacks that are totally incompatible with standard motheboards, in my case I have sold a new case and a motherboard for less than the manufacturer wanted for the replacement motherboard alone.
Cases with metal plates covering plug points for standard PSU’s making it at best difficult if not impossible to use off the shelf power supplies. A repair that would otherwise cost about $30 in parts and take 15 min for anyone handly with a screwdriver.
Hi Opal
The joyus restore partition…HDD dies, so does your ability to restore/reload promptly.
Effectively shooting homebuilders/semi saavy users in the foot.
I bought a Talon from them 5 years ago and it’s been a total warhorse. I suspect it will run another five years. I just last month built myself a new PC using budget parts and it’s only an incremental improvement over the five year old Talon. I wouldn’t have bothered except I wanted a Dx10 video card and I have poor impulse control.
But my next computer, after I graduate and get a job, is going to be a Fragbox.
I’m not sure why this dead horse keeps getting beaten. Yes, obscure memory is a pain in the ass. Nothing about obscure memory is unique to Dell, and it’s easy enough to avoid. All I ever intended to state was that the original claim was wrong, you’ve confirmed that. Let it go.
Cite?
Those companies make lots of machines, very few of which have anything wrong with them. The ones that are “broken” are usually PEBKAC situations. Your customers, one average are far more savvy and self sufficient than your average Best Buy customer. I find it very hard to believe that the big brands have more hardware conflicts and failures than a homebuild or one-off. Now, do they end up with Windows issues…probably, driver issues…probably but the repetition and volume will give them a much lower rate of hardware conflict and failure than anything you buy at a parts shop.
If all mom and pop stores were great it’d be rare, this isn’t the case. And even with the good ones, the rate is higher than with the big boxes. You might call it insignificant but it’s something that the big boys are better at preventing. It might be the difference between 1% and 2%, but it’s still a reality.
Can you speak for every store? Even so, that type of service isn’t free. Your average homebuilder is best served to save the money if they are even remotely confident in their knowledge. That’s all I’m saying. I know you want to protect your livelihood and all, but come on. Cheaper is cheaper.
False. Gateway and Dell both send you the part they’ve diagnosed you need over the phone along with the RMA. Then you send back the old part. IME, getting the parts from Gateway was just as fast or faster than getting them from Newegg
Well, you’re the one that said, “somewhere in the vicinity of 1%.” Do you have a cite for that? I find it hard for me to believe based on my own experiences having three parts fail on me with the first couple weeks of owning the Gateway I had before this PC that I built.
No way. Most people have a MicroCenter or comparable store in near driving distance and EVERYONE has a Best Buy where you can get most basic needs making the entire mail situation is moot. And if you survey most people the vast majority will say that the shipping options from Buy.com, Newegg, CDW or whatever preferred parts supplier are way better than a manufacturers RMAs. I suppose there are parts of the country that have a Dell distributions center in their backyard, but for most of us it’s faster to get the damn part yourself one way or another.
Remember, I’m the guy saying you should buy a big brand for the savings. I’ve been very happy with my Dell and I’ve installed HPs and Levono’s in corporate environments with no complaints, but the warranty process is not better or faster than doing it yourself in any circumstance.
I think we all realize that this information simply isn’t available with any reliability. I don’t think many large companies could survive with a legitimate failure rate over 5% in today’s internet world. Especially in the tech arena. I’ve done corporate installs of literally several hundreds of units at once and the hardware failure rate was a fraction of 1%. One user having issues with a Gateway from maybe 5 years ago is hardly an apples to apples comparison, confirmation bias notwithstanding.
Aside from the sniping, back on the original question… I’ve built my last few systems, but for the latest I went with one off the shelf. Gateway FX 6800, Core i7-920 and overall nice specs.
I formatted the drive and installed a clean copy of vista ultimate 64-bit I had lying around, so no worries about bloatware. Aside from vista itself, of course. 
The heatsink is definitely not an OEM model - it’s better than the ones I put into my last couple of silent PC builds. And the entire system is significantly quieter than my own builds, which is annoying and cool at the same time.
I got mine at Best Buy, but it’s not listed on the site anymore. Too bad, it’s an excellent machine.
Did you do a price comparison between building one with the same specs as what Gateway put together?
Nitpick: If the heatsink came as is from Gateway isn’t that, by definition, an OEM part?
Did you do that on purpose? I’m guessing you did. You in no way responded to my rebuttal that Dell and Gateway do not wait until you send them the old part before sending you a new one, so, “yes way.” Do you concede that point or do you still believe that you have to send them the old part back before they will send you a new one?
It’s not moot. There are only 21 MicroCenter stores in the entire nation in only 14 states. We’re talking about replacing PC parts here. Most people want specific parts and won’t be satisfied replacing it with just any “basic need” part available at Best Buy that IME is much more expensive than what you’d find at Newegg or from Gateway or Dell.
You know this how? I’m not buying that for a second. When my Gateway parts needed to replaced they came in two days with a slip to slap on the box and a number to call to have UPS pick it up free of charge. How can paying for a part and waiting the same amount of time for it to be shipped by Newegg be any better?
Then you shouldn’t have asked for a cite from drachillix? Again, I needed three parts replaced from Gateway within the first month of owning one of their PCs and I know many others that needed warranty parts sent to them after buying Gateway or Dell. I don’t believe we can all be part of this 1% and beat the statistics so badly.
I had been building PCs since the 286 just entered the market, but my last two came pre-assembled and I do upgrades myself when needed. My current box came from Circuit City last year, it’s a Gateway 5662GT with a quad-core AMD Phenom and three gig. The weakest part by far was the video card, never did work right. Swapped out the mid-range ATI card for a GeForce 8800 GT and have rarely had any problem since.
I built my last few PCs, with my latest one being incrementally upgraded over the course of something like 7 years. It finally died completely on me and I wasn’t willing to kill myself over building another computer, so I went with iBuyPower after seeing some of their pre-built rigs on NewEgg.
Their customizer is fairly well done, although IMO a bit limited in options. I put together a Core 2 Duo computer using last year’s high-end tech that’s only mid-range now, and the final price I paid after shipping and everything had been included was about $900. Possibly a little pricey, especially since I requested no OS, but it comes with a three-year limited warranty, it was built and shipped faster than I could have done by myself, and it’s been rock solid since I got it a month ago, not to mention quiet. My last computer was a relatively standard box I kept hidden under the desk; this one’s right up on the desk next to the monitor, and it not only looks good with the window, but I can’t hear a damn thing from it. It made me nervous for the first couple of weeks, as I couldn’t be sure if it was working properly or not.
I don’t trust Dell or Gateway or HP or any other mass-market computer for my personal desktop. Not because I think they use proprietary parts, but because I don’t trust them to build a decent gaming computer. Companies like Falcon and iBuyPower know how to build robust rigs.
What on purpose? What the heck is your angle here? Can I prove that Dell/Gateway/HP will mail a part slower than Newegg/Buy.com? No. Can you you prove the opposite? All I’m saying is that if I were a betting man I’d put my money on Newegg. Would I win every time? Probably not, but I think I’d win most. I concede this is pure speculation, I’m not sure how one can prove it.
Initially I said “typically” a company requires you to send back a part before they’ll send you a new one. This is true. Now, I can’t say whether Dell or Gateway send the part immediately or not. I believe you so I’ll take that as fact. However, the topic came up as a response to drachillix assertions as a custom builder. As a custom builder she exploits the factory warranties provided by Asus, MSI, Antec, WD etc. They almost all require you to RMA the item first, or at least they did when I last had to return a part. Dell and Gateway may have changed their policy to be more competitive, good for them, however all that is besides the point.
The number of MicroCenters is neither here nor there. All I’m saying is that 90% of the population lives within an hour’s drive of a parts store. The vast majority of homebuilders know where the nearest store is or else they wouldn’t be homebuilders. If you are REALLY worried about uptime, which is what the OP originally claimed, waiting 2 days for a Gateway or Dell replacement part is unacceptable and you’ll be doing it yourself. It’s moot because if Gateway is faster or is Newegg is faster is irrelevant if waiting 2 days is 2 days too long. That is the point.
You are missing the point completely. Yes, getting a part for free via warranty is better than paying for a part all things being equal. Yes, you can get memory or a video card cheaper online than via Best Buy. But you’re forgetting the original premise: buying a refurb or discount box saves you hundreds of dollars up front. The main disadvantage to that is that it comes without a warranty. My entire point is that you can use that money you save there to do repairs yourself faster and cheaper in the long run. Yeah, you might get charged $50 for a memory stick at Best Buy versus warrantying it through Dell, but if you spent $350 instead of $700 upfront that’s a bargain!
:rolleyes: Do you not recognize snark?
Just for kicks I did some Googling and here’s what I came up with. A report from 2006 says desktop failure rates dropped from 7% to 5% in the first year. Presumably on machines built in 2004-05. Not surprisingly any other data is sparse and all my searches seemed to just link back to commentary about this one report. Still, I figure 5% is pretty accurate and in the intervening 4 years they’ve probably improved somewhat. For what it’s worth.
Did you do a price comparison between a home build version of the machine you bought?
Personally, I’d avoid HP at all costs.
Yes, I did price it out. Spent a few hours doing that, as I kept coming up with it costing more for me to build the same system from parts. I was using Newegg as my source for pricing. I eventually gave in and conceded that I could spend an extra $100-200 and a few hours, or I could just get the off-the-shelf system.
Re: OEM heatsink, I was talking about Intel as the Original Equipment Manufacturer for the CPU.
Today’s Woot is a pretty burly PC at a spritely $450. Could use a video card but otherwise it is a hell of a bang for your buck.
Are you sure you don’t want to just put it together yourself? I bought and built most of mine from newegg. I scoped things out for about a week first, and got very good prices, installed all the software myself so got no bloatware, got exactly the specs I wanted, and they had no problems with me returning a part after I changed my mind on it. Once I got everything it took me a couple hours to put everything together (taking my time), and a half day or so for Windows and most of my software. I posted a thread here asking for advice before building, and got lots of it. You don’t get system support like you do with Dell or Gateway, but it sounds like you’re knowledgable enough to service the machine yourself - which saves a LOT of time.
Software will take you more time to install than hardware, but I’d highly recommend doing it yourself. It’s really the only way to be sure you get what you want and don’t get what you don’t want. Sure you could get it pre-installed and delete, but any PC person will tell you it’s better to not install it in the first place.
Another advantage to self building: You get all your installation cd’s and manuals. A lot of pre-fabs require you to make your own restore cd’s, and some of them don’t allow you to disable the bloatware. If you forget to make these or you lose them your sol. I keep my motherboard boxes, as they’re the perfect size to store everything. Those boxes have everything relevant to that machine’s hardware and software, cd’s, wires, cables, screws, etc, so I know exactly where it all is.
My contribution to the Dell Debate: I had a Dimension 8100, and it got fried about a year after I bought it. I worked Mon-Fri leaving 7am, getting home 6pm, lived alone, and it was a HUGE hassle making the arrangements for them to come out. It was nice that I didn’t have to pay for anything, but for the hassle I’d rather have bought new parts and replaced them myself. Anyway, I bought memory and hd from a 3rd party site and had no probs with it. However, a few different people told me Dell uses refurbished (broken, then fixed) parts and puts them in “new” systems. This completely turned me off of them, and I started building my own.
I’ve not much experience with Gateway (Are they still in business? Have they gone underground or something?), but in my recent experience with other people’s Dells and Best Buys: If you’re the computer equivalent of “the little old lady who only drove this car to church on Sundays”, their low end machines are ok. They’ll give you your internet bingo site surfing, your email to the kids or whatever. Their mid range machines suck. They look nice at first glance, until you start wondering how that dinky little power supply is running an i7 machine, or why their motherboard make and model aren’t listed in the specs, or something similar. They usually have some nice parts (I’ve seen some recently with Radeon 4870’s) and some junk, and are generally not worth it. The higher end machines are way overpriced, and an experienced builder can put together a better machine for half the price in most cases.
Keep in mind with Dell, it depends on which system you buy, and what type of warranty you buy with it. I support hundreds of Dells in my current job. They are all Optiplex and Latitudes which are designed for enterprise use. Fewer hardware options, but they guarantee that you will be able to get exact build systems with the same or completely compatible hardware for a specified length of time. We also buy the 3 year next day onsite warranty. Since I can do the work faster myself, I email them on one day, and I’ve always had the replacement part in hand the very next business day.
I’m not pimping for them, and I’m a home builder for my own systems, (except for laptops - I’m a sucker for Thinkpads), but I have had very good experience with the support they offer aimed towards enterprise customers.
Based on the scenario in the OP, I would just follow the link offered by Razrak in the second post and go from there. My last system was one of their suggested builds, and it kicked butt of most any pre-built system with equal specs, and has a much better case and power supply to boot.
exactly. IMHO, if you’re going to be wiping and reinstalling the OS, you’re not really saving that much time comparatively by having someone else physically put things together. I mean, to assemble a box of parts from newegg, it would take me maybe 20 minutes to screw things together, compared to the two hours or more I’d need (minimum) to get windows up and running on the thing with basics (open Office, Firefox, CD ripper) installed. If you had to chase down the newest drivers for hardware, add another 20 minutes max, but these days you can probably get by with the shipped drivers for as long as you want.
Last I checked, hardware was pretty standardized: as long as the CPU fits in the motherboard socket, the memory is compatilble with the motherboard, the graphics card is the same slot type as the motherboard, and the board, power supply and HD are all SATA, you’re good to go, right? Am I missing anything?