Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler new computer

My last two computers (over the last three years) have both been HP. I got them at Costco for about 600 – 800 ea minus monitor. I just go in and pick up the second to the best one they have, which is generally faster than what I need. Once you uninstall all that HP crap, they run pretty good.

One draw back of building your own that no one has mentioned here, and what costs you…..is the software. If you build it, you need to buy your OS and whatever software you don’t already have or can’t transfer. Don’t know about you guys, but the only time I upgrade MS Office is when I buy a new PC.

I've had far better experiences with Dell than HP or IBM (Lenovo now). As far as getting the cheapest parts supply, well all of them do that. But I understand. Especially since all of the computers I build use very high quality power supplies. What I like beyond what might be called my own good luck with their systems over the years (and this makes it easy on IT types) is that you can give Dell a jingle and a new part will be sitting on your desk at 10 the next day with a paid return shipping sticker for the bad part. Of all the Dell machines I've administered the only problems that have occured on an even remotely ongoing basis is hard drive failures. Now, since Dell buys and sell ba-Jillions of hard drives from various manufacturers, and being that HDD's by their nature are one the most likely components to fail (anything with moving parts) this is not suprising. Intel was an IBM shop at the time (don't know now, our group started buying Dell's outside of the normal channels) and I can't tell you how many HDD's I replaced there. Of course IBM machines used IBM drives. Can't say I'm a huge fan of their laptops though. A little fragile (not nearly as bad as a Vaio, don't even get me started on those pansy-ass pieces of cow dung) The ThinkPad's I've run across have been ugly as hell but nearly bulletproof. As far as souping the system up, buy a Dell barebones and add your own RAM. Just don't tell tech support if you have to call them. Also,remember my fellow geeks, just because all of the forum members are using computers doesn't mean they are comfortable being up to their elbows in the innards of a computer.

Well good for you! In my case Dell has a horrendous customer service with the school district I work for (and I live in Austin so you would think Dell would do well at home right??). We just replaced about 150 computers since september and a good 20 of those already have hard drive problems. The issue? it took Dell 2 months to come and service them!! (I supposedly can't touch them if they're under warranty).
Anyway in my opinion, as well as their machines might be built their customer service is getting worse everyday.

That reminds me of the last batch of HPs we got sometime in 2000. Out of about 150, 20 or so had HD failures within a year. This was due to a widespread problem with IBM Deskstar drives, though, so we couldn't exactly blame HP. They were quick to ship out replacement drives, and even honored our request to NOT replace with IBM drives.

We've been happy with Maxtor.

Funny, funny, funny you should say that about HP!

No, No, No, NOT so funny!!!

The HP that we bought around 2000/1 had the HD do a major and irreversable dump here about a week ago.Did the screech and scrunch bit and......

Except that we're using Seagates.

I've used 3 Dell computers while in the employ of the feds and each one died promptly after the 3 year warranty ended.
Trying to replace simple parts like a cdrom was never possible b/c of the proprietary formats (specialized case, hole locations, etc.)
The only thing i might buy from Dell now is a cheap flatscreen monitor and even that i doubt.

More HP hard drive stories. My programmer used to work for a cancer software company here. All the bigwigs got new HP laptops, and one with a French keyboard was inadvertantly sent along with all the English keyboards, none of the suits wanted it, they didn't return it, so it became his.

Had it over here one day to do some LAN gaming and was looking at the extended functions on the function keys. We were trying to figure out what the glyph of the stack of pancakes over F12 meant. Hmm... BLUE FUNCTION-F12... oh, parks the drive heads, coolie... now... unpark... no, really, unpark... uh, shazaam. No dice. The heads are probably still parked on that sucker in a landfill.

Few days ago three of us were discussing hard drive manufacturers, about 12 years each of PC use (that's PC-compatible, not Personal Computer, we all came from Motorola/Mac or Sun/SPARC and CBM before that) netted us about 13 Western Digital drives that we can remember (I account for 6 of them - I still have the model and serial numbers written down for them). Of those 13, only 5 were retired before malfunctioning. Only one of us has ever killed a non-WD drive, bro packed in a Samsung IDE in his Frankenmac blue & white G3.

Longest runtime depends on your definition - I'm a daily user of two Quantum Fireball 20GB that I've taken with me to all my primary work systems since I broke the 1GHz barrier, about 6 years ago. One of the other guys has a pair of IBM Deathst... er, Darkstars that are older, but are in a secondary computer.

Bren R.

Skyhawk,

Very strange. I'm not sure what kind of warranty you have on those, but ours are next business day on-site for clients and 4-hour on-site for servers. They offer on-site for any repair but for most things we just have them send the part and replace it ourselves. This of course does not void the warranty. I just don't know what to say but my experience has been completely opposite of yours. I can't even imagine the hailstorm of sh!t my boss would bring down on our Dell rep if something like that happened. Damn HDDs. Can't wait until the NAND based ones are cheap and available. Oh well. There's a reason it is policy here that each employee is responsible for their data, and given a large backed up network share to store their critical stuff. If their HDD barfs and they haven't copied their work to the network drive in a week, well, they are deep doodoo.

Well that's why it sucks to work for a school district!! I want to replace the hard drive myself but they usually don't let me. I keep complaining everyday until somebody shows up and then eventually the Dell guy shows up or they send me a hard drive.

To be honest I think the main problem isn't Dell but the district IT department. What I don't like about Dell is the contractors that they have in the Austin area, they suck. I usually can do a better job than they can and faster but I'm tied by the policies the district has... Are there any job openings in your company?