On Wednesday 24 Jun 2015 19:16:01 Alan McKinnon wrote: > On 24/06/2015 19:35, [email protected] wrote: > > On Wed, Jun 24 2015, Alan McKinnon wrote: > >> One more thing I can add: From observation, I can say that Dell has 2 or > >> more grades of kit they sell: > >> > >> 1. Cheap shit. You find these in supermarkets and Walmart. It's just as > >> crappy as all the other cheap shit around with the same bargain basement > >> price. > > > > They call this inspiron > > > >> 2. Good stuff like the Precision and XPS range. You tend not to find > >> these at Walmart, and have to go to a proper dealer for them, or your > >> workplace has a scheme to provide them. > > > > These tend to be big or specialized or super-graphics. Latitude is the > > line for "normal" business. > > Yes, that's the ones :-)
Minor caveat emptor: I bought an XPS some years ago for an exceptionally high amount of money - close to what I would pay for an AppleMac. More than a month after I placed an order I still had no laptop ... Multiple enquiries with Dell and being bounced between them and their delivery company, revealed that it wasn't just China taking forever to assemble it or ship it, but there was ultimately a problem with their mickey mouse delivery company and a particular driver who 'lost' my XPS. So I asked them to dispatch another preferably with a different delivery company. More than two months after the initial order I was relieved to receive a box with a laptop in it. It was all new and shiny, but its plastic frame was bent upwards in the middle, along with the keyboard, with keys ending up rubbing against the screen and marking it. What I am trying to describe is that the main laptop case had a considerable curve in the middle, while the screen was flat, creating an area of contact between the keyboard and the middle of the monitor surface. In a few months the monitor was scratched, as I used to take it to work on a daily basis and as you would do with a laptop I had to ... close the lid. Given the experience of waiting for more than two months I did not return it at the time. Since then the power supply/battery charger failed because it was under-rated for the large battery option I had chosen. I had to buy a new bigger power supply at a considerable cost from Dell. By now I had spent at least as much as an AppleMac would have costed, but without the brushed aluminium case and buttons. :-( Finally, the plastic left Shift key broke as I was using a vacuum cleaner to remove dust from the keyboard. I can't bring myself to order a new keyboard and bodged some sticky tape fix for now, given that the laptop is 5 years old. The good things about it have been: 1. It works fine without any other hardware failures than described above. 2. The battery still gives me just over 20 minutes on the battery, after a couple of cells died a year or so ago. 3. With a 1st gen i7 CPU it was faster than anything else in my household at the time and it is still pretty respectable on the compiling front. 4. The quality of the 1080p monitor is still impressive, but unfortunately scratched a bit in the middle. If I were to order again a laptop from Dell I would try not to order it without a back up machine - a silly statement I know, since PCs often break down when you are least prepared for it! :p I would definitely return it if things as major as a bent case were evident. I would seek a refund for the MSWindows OS that it comes preinstalled with. (This is a blatant case of software bundling with their products and the refusal to cough up a refund when requested remains incompatible with European Directive 2005/29/EC. Court test cases in France and Belgium have validated this and big boys like Dell are now more cautious when confronted by informed consumers assertively requesting refunds.) However, first and foremost I would try to look at options for building a laptop myself. I would not buy a ready made dekstop PC from an OEM, because I can get a better/cheaper selection of components myself, so I would like to explore this for laptops too. -- Regards, Mick
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