The problem there Jjimm is that the majority of laptops are actually made by Acer and are badge-engineered.
I have a Toshiba Equium that has been perfect for the last - I think four years now - the problem is that although I have looked with an idea of replacing it there has never been another offered at the same spec/price and some of the higher priced ones have inferior specs.
On the other hand I have a colleague with a Dell, bought for £400 from PC world, that is streets a head of mine (I paid £550) and has never had a problem since he bought it two years ago.
I was tempted to get one but the same thing happened - all gone and nothing else to come close to matching them.
You’re still covered under Sale of Goods Act in the UK - as long as there’s a “reasonable” expectation that whatever component should have lasted longer than it currently has you can ask for a refund, repair or replacement.
I thought Dell had a great reputation in the late 80s and 90s. But I bought a laptop from them and had a problem that not only couldn’t I resolve from the telephone “support”, but could not find anyone who even understood the problem. I returned it for full refund. Never again. Only Sun had worse customer relations. Much worse.
As others have said, Dell used to be the most (or nearly so) expensive PC you could buy and had an excellent reputation. At some point around 2000 they started to mass-market and lower their prices and quality.
The last couple of places I’ve worked (all corporate IT jobs) all have moved from Dell to HP, and I’m pretty happy about the move. Something happened to Dell around the time of the capacitor plague, they just couldn’t keep their growth and cost-cutting going. Everything I’ve bought from them in the past few years has been junk, while the HP machines run like tops. I can’t imagine advising anyone to go with Dell for either the desktop of the server until they change their ways.
Not to mention they knowingly shipped bad capacitors with a a 90% fail rate. I think the industry would be better off if Dell folded. Too much baggage and bad management.
I worked in tech support and was a computer science student from 1997 through the end of the millennium, and obviously heavily interested in computers long before that. Dell was seen then as AWESOME for the buy-a-whole-computer market (I preferred to build from parts). The stinkers were names like Compaq, Packard-Bell, and Gateway 2000. Even IBM was known for loading way too much sponsored crapware on their machines (though in my experience their hardware was fairly solid). In the 2000s, Dell started to go downhill first for regular home users – support started to suck (unless you bought an “XPS” model). Then it started to suck for corporate/institutional users too – the capacitor problems hit the Optiplex GX270s HARD (we had to have motherboard replacements done on hundreds in just my division alone, every single GX270 we had failed). They sent techs out to replace them same-day or next-day, but it was still a huge pain in the ass – and we couldn’t convince them to replace them all preventatively, they had to fail first.
So now we’ve switched to HPs at work, and they’re fine so far. And I’ve switched to building my own computers at home again (after having an admittedly pretty good experience with a Dell XPS that lasted forever as far as gaming PCs go, albeit with several upgrades along the way).
Okay, I remember that it was eMachines that sucked.
HP was Awesome, and then the bean counters took over and the company split into Agilent (test equipment) and HP (computers and printers) and now HP is mostly known for printers as they can sell you a print cartridge emptier machine for $50 and get you hooked on $30 replacement cartridges, and each printer needs 2 (minimum).
And yeah, I’ve built all my machines. Tom’s Hardware is one place to go that has all the latest info on building the killer machine or a budget machine, what ever you want.
Well…thanks for the replies. I, of course, was a total noob at the time, but it seems that the locals hated Dell. Of course, I wasn’t overly cosmopolitan in my PC outlook, so it may have been a regional delusion.
I’m on my second Toshiba Satellite. The first one lasted ~5yrs before the CD-ROM failed. Rather than replace it, I just picked up a new one. There were no other problems with the old one, other than a crappy battery (and even then, it lasted 3-4 years until the life began to drop).
I’m using an Acer netbook now, and my GF has an Asus netbook. Both are roughly the same. I experience some laginess, but I went on the cheap (dad wanted to buy it for me as a Christmas present; had it been my own money, I would have spent more of it) and it’s running Win7 (which is, by the way, a pretty good OS). Acer’s previously piss-poor reputation was more in the laptop/notebook arena. They’re among best-of-breed in netbooks (IMHO).
I work in IT for a company that buys exclusively dell for desktops, and a mix of dell & hp for laptops.
For desktops at least, we haven’t had many problems, but these are all business level PCs, so maybe their consumer PCs are trash. I have a Dell at home and it seems pretty good.
We currently order Optiplex 960s for desktops, which is fairly high end, but we get a good price through our Dell rep. They seem to be very solid.
I don’t know how they would compare with another brand of desktops, since we’ve only used Dell desktops, but I love being able to customize Dell PCs for what we need.
My first Windows PC ever was a Fujitsu laptop, and I got that in 1997, and it lasted about 7 years, and was amazingly durable. However, it seems Fujitsu has stopped selling consumer level, at least last I checked.
I dunno… I still insist on building my non-Apple machines (and I recently rebuilt my Linux whole-house server as a Mac clone). Sure, I could have gotten a Dell, dude, even with a corporate discount, but for non-desktop machines I still prefer modularity and picking and choosing exact components.
However like the majority, I remember Dell as being the reliable, corporate standby since at least the late-mid 90’s. GW2K was the “consumer” go-to company (that domain no longer works, sadly!).
I’ve built my own machines since 2000, but as computers go, Dells aren’t bad (nor have they really ever been) for what they are.
Dell is a good corporate supplier - i.e., you run a big corporation, you need a lot of plain-vanilla machines and decent tech support. Dell fits this just fine.
Now, for my own machine I would never buy a Dell. But nor would I buy any corporate brand. 90% are underpowered corner-cutting boxes (Dell) and the other 10% have nice hardware but are fantastically overpriced (Alienware).
If you need to run Word, Excel and email - Dell is just fine. Anything beyond that hie thee to Tom’s Hardware and learn to build your own.