On Fri, 3 Jun 2016, Sam O'nella wrote: > I'm a bit surprised at the recommendation of Dell but maybe they weren't > playing all their proprietary games yet.
I was a little surprised, too. However, different strokes for different folks, I suppose. My experience with Dell machines mostly mirrors yours. However, I did have a core2 class Optiplex desktop that was very solid and standard. > I've seen where they rewired a nonstandard power connector so you'd fry > it replacing it with a standard power supply or fry your other system > using one of their power supplies but can't remember if that was at or > atx. Wow, that's nasty. You'd hope they didn't do that on purpose but if so... ugh. > Seen where they did something stupid and notched their ram so it had to > be registered memory. I ran into this with one of their workstations. I can't remember the model, either, though. > Either way. They quickly became a vendor i lost trust in but maybe lots > of vendors also did that and i just ended up working on their problems > the most. For me there were two things that made me have a fairly low opinion of Dell: 1. When they offshored their support folks, brought some back, then offshored again. The couple times I had to call support due to firmware issues on the old 2650, I could only talk to folks who could speak broken English, and knew almost nothing about the subject matter at hand. 2. When I worked at Oracle, we deployed thousands of Dells (about 30k over 5 years IIRC). The out-of-box failures were numerous and painful (because I had to RMA, re-pack, and ship the damn things back). > Mca and vlb cards are harder to come by and fetch a higher price range > vs isa/Eisa or pci. Fortunately, I have a decent collection of interface cards, though I might still settle on something new if there is a compelling reason. > Definitely stay away from Cyrix processors. Most computer stores i knew > in the 486 era wouldn't even sell them or take them as trade ins. > Comparability issues and overheating seemed to be common features. I know that was the case with the so-called 5x86 (586). It had straight-up bugs in the silicon, IIRC. However, the 486 models I had were very solid and quite fast for the money. These days, however, I'd probably go the Intel route. > Interesting comments on parallel drives. They're nice for compatibility > on multiple systems but much slower than their scsi sisters. Sooooo much slower. When I'm forced to use an LPT port for transferring data on those old machines, I'd use Laplink. I was always disappointed with parallel port devices, because they never seemed able to reach the same transfer speeds as Laplink and other direct-cable software. -Swift
