I am currently sitting on a very turbulent BMI flight to Vienna, as usual, for the penultimate leg of my summer holidays. As I am flying unaccompanied, I get to cut the lines, board first and get general priority over everyone else! Unfortunately, the airline screwed up the seating plan, so a family of 4, who just HAD to sit together, also booked my seat. Being a kind of nice adolescent, I moved willingly, only to find that wherever I sat, people were telling me to leave, so I am now grumpy and as a result, you are going to get a grumpy post!
This post is about Dell, as I am sure you can tell by the title. I was inspired to write this by a recent follower of my twitter account, namely, @DellCares! I had been tweeting about Dell and adding my opinion, in the customary way. As a result, they tweeted this:
@nicolasweninger Regret any trouble. Pls follow/DM service tag, issue specifics. Will look into any unresolved issue you may have. Thanks.MA
First of all, the name is ironic, as to be shown later in this post, and the pretend kindness is just a way of then attempting to get me back into their corporate crap. Just look at this tweet from another Dell account, along with my comment:
Quote @DellCares: Simplify schoolwork with a thin and powerful laptop that packs impressive productivity. Indeed so, Get a mac.
RT @DellHomeUS: Turn heads in class with a laptop that redefines thin, light and powerful del.ly/6017R3px WHAT? ARE YOU SERIOUS? MBAIR?
Funny, no? All will be revealed later, but for now, let us start at the beginning of my Dell Experience.
My dad gave me his old, 1.5 years, Dell computer back around 2002, when I was 6. I would play games, explore the file system and wonder with a wild imagination what on earth Internet Explorer was! It was a great computer for what a 6 year old usually does. Then it died, as any computer does, after 4 years of service to me and helping foster my current computer skills, which are admittedly, not as good as my friend's, Henry Dyer!
It was a good computer, made back when Dell was actually good! Anyway, after that, we moved, stuff happened, and we ended up (no idea how) buying a £2000 Dell XPS, with 2 disk drives! WOW! It was far too powerful for our family: I used word, mum used email, and my sister played Club Penguin! Aside from the fact that it was a well-maintained computer running on XP, after about a year, the speed of this thing started plummeting. Eventually, it took a few minuets until the computer started up and was logged in. THEN the best thing happened: the power button broke off! I pressed it and it snapped off! From then on, every time you wanted to start it up, you had to open the computer and press this tiny little button in the most awkward place imaginable, to hear the fans spinning at a rate faster than aircraft jets. HOWEVER, this was just a sign of things to come...
We sold the XPS for £350, down from £2000, and the money was given to me to buy a laptop. Not being the best researcher, I opted for a Dell machine, specifically, the Inspiron 1525. It cost £400, had a 1,8Ghz Intel core 2 duo processor and 2GBs of RAM. Decent specs, wouldn't you agree? We ordered it from Dell online and it came 3 weeks later. This being my first laptop, I was so happy! I remember sitting with it in my lap and admiring it! Now, when I look at it, I have go keep myself from puking! First startup was a drag, you know, Vista install and such, and when I was finally granted access by the great lords of Vista (who live somewhere on the outskirts of the galaxy), I spent an hour making the desktop look perfect and uninstalling all the crapware. At the time, this was a normal part of a new computer to me. Then came the usage. Oh, god the usage.
Unlike the XPS, the speed of the Inspiron decreased over time, but when it did, it was noticeable. First, my user would not load: a black screen at each login attempt greeted me. I had to keep a separate backup user on hand to repair the damn registry, which helped on occasion. When I finally was able to log back in, it would take iTunes and other similar programs about 2 hours to open, and I am seriously not exaggerating! Eventually, I got frequent blue screen errors, to which I called dell support, who gave me no help whatsoever. They might well of just said " please put a blanket over the screen to make it go away". So you can see why I call the name @DellCares ironic. The laptop became useless, leading to my friend Jack Usher dubbing it "the Dell CrapTop", which I find to be a very fitting name. As a side note, there was a light for a Bluetooth connection, but I never found the setting to switch it on! Dell even forgot to install that driver!
We got an iMac, I got a MacBook and the CrapTop now sites nicely under my bed collecting dust. We are a 100% mac family now, and we subsequently have no more problems.
But wait, that is not the end yet. Oh no! There is one more place where I have no choice but to use a Dell computer, and that place is commonly known as school.
Yes, yes, I know, macs are far too expensive to buy for a big school with well over 200 terminals, but Dell? Come on! One of my teacher’s computers takes 10 minuets to start up an even then they are slow. The network is on the brink of collapsing and the computers constantly overheat. There it a good reason the school is in talks with Apple over a volume mac purchase!
One more thing. Have you ever used a Dell laptop before? If so, go to an Apple store and play around with the MacBooks and tell me which one feels better and is more comfortable to use, ignoring the Windows Vs. Mac software argument. I actually prefer using the track pad to the mouse now! How often do you hear that from a Dell user?
So, I hope this cleared things up for you. Now you know why I hate Dell. We currently have a trio of companies I hate now! Dell, Microsoft and Sony. Dell, among other companies, is an ambassador for windows, and unfortunately, if they do not preform, the whole public view of Windows will fall. Just look at what happened with vista: I, as well as many other people, made the jump to mac, and I anticipate that not many people are going to go back in a hurry, especially with OSX Lion to Match!
To summarize the reiteration, Dell is screwed.
