For the past few years I have seen myself slipping more and more away from Dell computers. PC's entirely for that matter. Admittedly I had been building my own for several years, but Dell had my loyalty especially in the laptop market. With Vista now more than a year old, their is little to no excuse for the most lowest end Dell ( HP, TOSHIBA, LENOVO, WHATEVER) machines advertised not to be fully capable to at least run Vista Home basic smoothly. Especially when they come from the factory labeled Vista ready!!!
While the picture to the left is certainly a statement of sorts, and not meant to be directly defamatory towards anyone, it is quite simply an accepted perception these days of tech support services. After all it was found among a series of many pictures and articles and passed around, just as I am writing now. Tech support (another story) is at an all time abismal state. And it appears to be needed now more than ever. Now, when PC's should be much simpler than they were, say in the Windows 95 days, or even earlier. But enough of that. My grief is with Dell.
My father, on my suggestion purchased another Dell, in the past month. Brand new, barely a sub $1000 PC but by no means minimally powered machine. A very Good 2+ Gig AMD Core Duo proc, 2 Gigs of Ram, and 300+ gigs storage space. One week into his ownership, after I'd set up his wireless and downloaded the 30+ minutes of Vista Updates (shame on you Dell, this should be up to date at ship time, don't you build to order???) he was off and running. And all appeared to be working well.
I got a call from him not hardly a week later, stating he had been on the phone with a Dell support guy for no less than 2-3 hours uninstalling and reinstalling using the Dell restore disk, only to discover the same problems of Slow boot times, and IE7 taking forever to start after Vista finally wakes and discovers the wireless connection? Also his support rep was barely understandable throughout the process further aggravating and elongating the process through repeated steps due to poor english speaking language skills. So Dell saves a few dollars on overseas labor so my father has to try to listen to some guy overseas read from a useless script?? How is this possible with a brand new machine, not even yet loaded with USER third party software, or even a few hours of internet use to speak of.
Yes we loaded an antivirus, and yes, Windows Defender and Firewall were all in use.
It is simply inexcusable for this type of product to hit the market. While I know my father is not alone, and I too experienced some problems with Dell recently, I felt that Vista had matured enough and with Mike Dell back in the ranks at Dell, these types of issues would be a thing of the past. Folks, take my word for it. If you want a simple easy set up and a great responsive and simply a fun computing environment. BUY A MAC! Nuff said.
