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Question about Dell computers

Huntsman said:
Another thought, if you are in school or college (even correspondence or other non-traditional schooling), or are a government employee (civillian or military), you can get a discount from Dell through their EPP program. Many employers, particularly larger companies, may have agreements with Dell to offer discounts, as well.

Dell is not the top of the line, but they are a good computer for the price, especially consdiering the peripherals you get (printer, screen, etc).

And, contrary to what most others are saying, building your own is almost unilaterally going to cost more. I used to build my own, but it was far too expensive. Not even adding in the cost of my time to put it together, get everything installed, correct conflicts in drivers or software, etc. It used to be true that building your own was less expensive, but not anymore.

Also, when you add the price of an OS and your business software into your cost, building your own generally goes even higher in price. If you doubt this, check for yourself. Get specs on a Dell system, including everything it comes with. Then price what it would cost you to purchase the same componenets, similar case, power supply, software, peripherals, etc speperately, include shipping costs (or travel expense if you are going somewher to get it), and you're generally at least 10% higher than Dell's price. And you haven't even added in time. At my last job, we were able to get wholesale prices on parts, and even then I couldn't build my own system for less than Dell's price.

The Dells now use pretty much standard parts, off-the-shelf. The motherboards are made specifically for Dell, meaning you can't buy, say, a Dell GX280 board from anyone but Dell. However, they follow industry standards for spacing, form factor, connections, etc.
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I agree with you here.
 
Thanks for all the info. I'm alway leary about low priced computers. Especially when they never give much info on what is inside them. Just the basic, 512 MB ram, slow as a snail 250 GB hard drive. I thought about builing my own because I do so many different things with the system I have now (games/music/midi/graphics) about everything but programming. And it's only a PIII 600!! With a graphics card with a broken fan. Nice. So, if I can get a decent brand name computer at a good price and not have low end products in it, that would be the best. I don't really care about customer service, as long as they honor a warranty, I can usually fix all the mess-ups I make with a system.
Although, all things being perfect, I would just get one of those sweat top o' the line Alienware systems.
 
I'm really sorry to hear all that bad news about Dell. My last couple of computers have been Dells, but the last, a laptop, was in 2002. I spent a lot of time on the Delltalk forums too for a while, and thought that was one of Dell's best bits of customer service. There were some very smart people there, and a very helpful community.
 
I went to the Dell web site and spec'ed a machine similar to the one I just purchased and I would have had to spend $1100 more at Dell. To be fair it would have included a bunch of stuff I didn't want but I couldn't seem to not take it. So scratch the 17 inch CRT and the keyboard, mouse and speakers. Maybe $300 in value. Take off maybe another $200 because the Dell had an extra gig of ram with a free offer and it is still about $600 more. Assuming that Dell is cheaper is a mistake.

Having said that if all I wanted was cheap little boxes and software for business or basic use then Dell has some good deals. I guess it depends on what you want.

ETA: Dell doesn't use AMD inside. Actually a major reason why I wouldn't buy them.
 
Huntsman said:
Also, when you add the price of an OS and your business software into your cost, building your own generally goes even higher in price. If you doubt this, check for yourself. Get specs on a Dell system, including everything it comes with.
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Who actually buys all that software?... Oh uh pretend I didn't say that...

LLH
 
The problem with Dell isn't the computer itself. It's the service, or rather the LACK of. If you get lucky and have a trouble free computer, no worries. But if you have ANY kind of issue you will quickly wish you had never gone to Dell.
I never wanted a dell, but allowed my husband to talk me into it. I had read about lots of problems from people before hand about the very issues I'm having now. Now he's convinced and we can go ahead and do business with the company we should have from the start.
 
chasing23 said:
What do you end up fixing on them most?
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Replacing CD drives and hard drives mostly. The stuff that fails usually on any PC. On laptops it's usually hard drive or screen.

Incidentally, two points:
Don't buy a Dell printer. Ever. They're just rebadged Lexmarks (poor quality cheap printers subsidised by the cost of the consumables, very expensive in the long run)
And Alienware are good, but they don't make their own stuff either. All their laptops are just Clevos with a glowing alien head stuck on the back, for example, with a price tag about 20% higher.

I'd buy a Dell if I needed a new PC because I'm getting lazy in my old age - if I could be bothered or if I wanted to play the latest games, I'd build my own :)
 
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