just wondering what the consensus is on dell. too late now, just wondering.

i bought the flamingo pink inspiron 1521 (athlon x2 64 1.8GHz, 120GB hdd, 2GB ram, bluetooth, etc.). flamingo pink logitech v220 mouse and flamingo pink laptop bag. it's for the mother of my children (b-day and xmas).

i'm sorry

They're pretty decent machines, all the non-apples we've got here at work are all dells. They come into our office broken much more often than the apples.

Well, I have one, I can't play the latest games due to a weak videocard but the rest is adequate.

she'll only be playing flash games and stuff online. she does photo albums, e-mail, watches tv and video etc. she doesn't need a great video card.

i've heard some good things about dell in the past couple of years. even their service seems to be getting better. we'll see. hopefully we won't need it.

Rob will disagree, but I've actually had the exact opposite experience (drawing from working with several companies, dealing with VERY LARGE amounts of dells. So this isn't based on one or two computers I personally have owned). The past couple years their quality and support have really degraded.

Dell used to suck. Now it really sucks. The machines may be okay, but the workmanship, warranty, and support is pathetic.

And an AMD X2 was not a good choice of CPU >.>

I've had a higher end Dell laptop for over 3 years now, and I'm quite happy with it. To be fair, the graphics card has burned out 3 times (playing too many games on a CAD card?), and there was a problem with the DVD burner, but all of the matters were resolved relatively quickly and free of any cost to me. The warranty has been rock solid, so I really can't complain. Oh, I also got a new free battery during that big recall a year or so ago.

In summary, the machine isn't perfect, but in my humble opinion, that fact has been more than made up for by the warranty.

Get a new one?


Their "service" involves much time on hold and deciphering Indian accents, after that it's fine. Dell's Vista Upgrade CD sucked, erased the BIOS from my motherboard for no reason whatsoever. After fighting Indian tech support by taking my ram out and putting it back in about a dozen times with no different results, I got a replacement in a couple of days. (After I made damn sure to tell them it was their CD that was to blame.) So, aside from their Tech Support line being in the boonies, their support seems fine.

As far as I can tell they seem to exclusively use Seagate HDs.

Dell PSUs are underrated. My 305w can probably pull 350w with no trouble. I believe it's got dual 12v rails both running 18 amps. (Based on repeated information found on Dell's forums and various internet sites.)

A couple of annoyances of mine are the size of the CPU heat shroud on the E521 and the position of the [only] PCIE slot (The bottom) in relation to the only available power connector. (The top, with the drives, and almost no slack at that.) Makes using any PCIE card with a power cord a challenge, though that could also be blamed on the card maker providing a power cord that is shorter than my hand is long...

Also, couldn't you have gotten something a bit more powerful than a 1.8Ghz X2? I know my 2.6Ghz X2 is pretty cheap these days and it handles everything I've thrown at it fine.

Why did you get pink? That cpu was a pretty poor choice also..

...

oh

pink because that's what she wanted.
amd 'cause it was $100 less expensive.

i'm sure she wouldn't care or see the difference. what she does with a computer won't require a high end processor. i'm sure a single core 1GHz processor would be fine. as mentioned earlier, e-mail, word processing (work), photo editing and albums, video and tv from online (miro)... she doesn't need anything more than what i got else i would've gotten it. she rarely multi-tasks more than gmail and word and maybe a couple of pics open in picassa.

I've owned alot of different kind of laptops.

IBM and Dell are my favorites.

I've had more Dell than anything, because I get a discount, and because their customer support while a pain the *** to deal with will usually hook you up when you need help.

I was curious to see what OS options are available for the Inspiron 1521, I did a quick check and saw Dell doesnt offer that model with Ubuntu.

I'm sure Vista will still run well enough for your Mom err any woman.

The mother of his children is his mom? Something wrong there...

my mom. ha!!

she likes vista. we have it on one of our acer desktops. take note of how i mentioned what she would be using it for earlier.

My mom likes Vista alot too.

It has alot of MAKE THINGS BIG SO I CAN READ THEM options, but it does them in a very non-ugly way.

Aero is cool too.

Bah. good for you.
If its only his.. wife? using it then it shouldn't matter if its top of the line.

We have a ten year old dell with most of the base missing, a flamed out ethernet chip, and windows 98 without updates.

Been running smoothly since 3 years ago (When it was last formatted) no HD crashes or even any OS crashes.
Things invincible.

ex-wife.

My Latitude D610 is churning on strong for almost two years. But yeah, I am afraid of a technical problem that will force me to call Dell. I had to do that one time with my mom's Dimension 8400. It had a PSU issue (well known) and it was not fun on the phone asking "what? What was that again? Repeat that." many many times.

However, I am starting to feel an inkling for a new laptop. Vista won't run well on my laptop.

Just don't get 4 gigs of RAM on a Dell machine. Dell hasn't been able to get the license from Microsoft to sell machines with Vista 64 bit, so you really only get about 3.2 gigs of RAM if you purchase 4 (32 bit Vista).

We have nothing but Dells at my work, they break more often than not. Dell has pretty good customer support though, they'll replace practically anything.

I've had a Dell Inspiron 5160 about 3½ years now. It had a dodgy headphone jack and the backlight on the screen broke after 2 years but those are things I wouldn't blame Dell for.
What I don't like is how insanely hot it runs (the DVD-RW is partly to blame for this). Which wouldn't be so bad if the vents for the cooling system were sensibly placed or if the fan and heatsink were vaguely accessible for the occasional dusting.

When it shutdown due to overheating, I figured it was time to bite the bullet and clear out the dust. To get there I removed: the battery, harddrive, DVD drive, keyboard, screen, little power button thing, the outer casing and an EMI shield. There were screws everywhere.
I ever so slightly bent the EMI shield when I removed it and when I replaced it, it was touching something and it refused to start up beyond powering up. It took me a long time and a fair bit of panicking that I'd just completely screwed up my laptop before I worked out what was wrong.

Eh, hopefully they've changed the design by now.

Well, to get to the heat spreaders on mine you have to take the keyboard and the palm rest off.

Something like 16 screws, it goes pretty quick if you've done it before.

My Dell Precision M60 has a little hatch on the back that lifts out the main fan, and provides direct access to the heat sinks. The hatch only has one screw. I think there are more heat sinks elsewhere, though.