avoid doing business with dell

[rone]

A friend had his credit card number stolen after a site he used was cracked. His bank rep told him that two of the charges had gone through because, even though they'd received "Confiscate card: stolen" notifications, they nonetheless ran the charges through. One of them was dell.com. The rep went on to say that Dell is the king of credit card fraud — they do no address checking or any sort of verification. He also said that nearly every card he dealt with in November had Dell charges.

Comments

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

The card-issuing bank, of course, is blameless to let the charges pass through after it is aware that the card has been reported stolen. This is clearly all Dell's fault.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Actually, as it was told to me, Dell put the charge through anyway and Visa accepted. So the blame in accepting Dell's stupid charge lies with Visa and not the card issuer.

[vspope.livejournal.com]

I'm in the market for another computer, actually, but I'm at a stage where I'm not entirely sure what I want yet. I'm replacing my old Packard Bell P-133, but I don't need l33t specs to do what I want to with the replacement (games, internet, emulators, messing around).

Part of me says that my current Athlon 1300 is good enough, and that I should pick up a used machine for dirt cheap with similar or slightly lesser specs. Or I can go to the local shop where I bought my current PC and throw a list of parts at them, and they'll hack together a newer one and let me make my Athlon the backup. Or I could track down a laptop... though I'm leaning rather new than used for that, just to get a decent battery, and if not Dell I'm not sure who to go with.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

As it happens, I've got an Athlon 1300Mhz (this was the T-Bird chip, shortly before they started their "Athlon XP NNNN" naming convention to compete with Pentium's higher clockspeed numbers.

So far, it's handled with aplomb everything, including some pretty serious games, with no problem. I've got a plain-jane GeForce 3 in the AGP slot, and I bought it with 768MB RAM, which no doubt helped. It doesn't do top-of-the-line framerates, but it does a good job even with some of the more advanced features (not so much with the Anti-Aliasing) turned on.

However, an original 1.3GHz Athlon setup will date the computer to before the time when Firewire was commonly found on PC motherboards, USB2 existed (and USB1.0 was just barely common, but still not commonly easily accessed such as on the front of towers-- but that usually turns out to be a cheat anyway, not a mobo feature), and of course before the sexy stuff like SATA drives in RAID. Mine doesn't have onboard ethernet, and it might have onboard sound, but not video. But given what you're coming from, I can tell that won't be a problem. Packard Bell?! I hear bad things about those machines.

I'm happy enough with it, though, even when I'm doing heavy work like overnight video encoding, realtime DVD decoding (or even DVD decoding while ripping), audio playback of all stripes, etc. It's a good solid computer, a long way from being obsolete. I bought this one in August 2001 (and spent the week of September 11th setting it up, I vividly recall). I've upgraded video, sound, and CD-RW (also not standard at that time), but I've not yet felt the pull to upgrade the chip or overclock it.

[vspope.livejournal.com]

Yup, mine is also a 1300 T-Bird, same timeframe. 256MB RAM, a 32MB GeForce 2 GTS, with two CDRWs (can't get more than 24x out of the newer one, so my UDMA settings may still be hosed) and an overworked HD.

That one I'm not throwing out by any means, as it's still quite useful. I'm not a big-time 3D gamer (meaning that I don't buy a new $400 video card each month to get that critical extra 1.4 frames-per-second in Quake III), so what I have is sufficient. I can rip movies to VCDs, I can play Visual Pinball, it's good.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

If you're going to get a laptop, you'll probably want to get an IBM Stinkpad.... those cost more, but a refurb should be pretty decent. I also check PC World's Top 15 Notebooks (http://pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,113454,00.asp) list often, just in case i ever do break down and buy a laptop of my own (not that it's necessary anymore, as i have two work-issued laptops, an HP OmniBook 6000 [not bad, but the newer HP stuff sucks] and a Stinkpad T40 [very nice]).

Packard Bell.... aieee. The horrible memories.

[vspope.livejournal.com]

Packard Bell was an object lesson in Why You Don't Buy PCs Off-The-Rack From Big Retail Chains (in this case, the late-and-not-lamented Computer City). It was my first PC (I had Apple IIs before that) and it showed. It had a hydra modem-sound card, it had a highly incompatible CD-ROM drive, and it performed like a constipated wombat, even with subsequent processor, memory, HD, video card, modem and sound-card upgrades.

I've never actually owned a laptop; I'm considering one now because my wife and I are on two-to-three-hour car trips relatively often, and it'd be neat to have a portable machine that whoever's in the passenger seat can watch DVDs or play Ultima on. That's not doesn't require major specs, so I'm torn between a used laptop in the 600-1000MHz range or a new one that'll essentially replace my 1300. If I go the latter route, I'll want one with at least SOME video card on board in lieu of "integrated video," so that if I want to even pretend to 3D-game with it (say, Morrowind on the road) it won't catch on fire.

[samantha2074.livejournal.com]

Bummer! I've been happy with Dell in the past. OTOH, the last time I ordered something from them was over three years ago, and a lot can change in that time.

[tongodeon.livejournal.com]

I once bought a shady Dell laptop from CraigsList. I became suspicious and verified through Dell that it had been purchased with a stolen credit card number. (In supremely coincidental karma, the stolen credit card of the woman who had hired me at Tippett Studio and got me my first job in the biz.)

I turned in the thieves who were persuaded by the detectives to return my money to me, so I didn't lose anything. When I called Dell to determine where to return the laptop, they were baffled. They didn't know how to handle the question. Apparently nobody had ever recovered a laptop purchased with a stolen credit card - and there was no procedure in place for where it should go.

There was also no procedure in place to reward the honest person who ratted on the credit card thieves, delivering them to Dell and returning the expensive merchandise which had been stolen from Dell. Without this service they wouldn't have gotten their laptop back and the card company wouldn't have thieves to prosecute. I didn't even get a "thank you". Screw Dell. Next time I'm extorting hush money from the thieves and keeping the laptop.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Makes me feel better about the ass-pain they made it when I ordered a PC from MidWest Micro (now called Global Computer, but my dad and I have bought 4-5 machines from MidWest Micro, though the last, this one I'm on and the Athlon 1300 I'm talking about, technically was built by Global Computer)-- I wanted them to ship it to my workplace, and they made me get my workplace listed on my credit-card, something I had to do through my bank. Sounds simple, I suppose, but at the time I didn't think much of it.

Re: hacker protection

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I know AmEx does that, but i've never tried it. I should definitely consider investigating it, and see if my MasterCard has it, too.

Thanks for the e-mail hint. I'll see if i can follow through and re-register to vote tomorrow.

Re: hacker protection (reposted, changed to anon from my username)

[(Anonymous)]

I use a shopsafe method by my Visa bank where I never, ever give out my real card number for an internet or phone purchase. This method generates a unique Visa number, expiration date and CVV verification number (the number on the back of your card) for each transaction; you set a limit and it can't be exceeded. Only the vendor you purchase from will be able to use that card number and they never know your real number. It is somehow recognized by your visa account and appears on your bill. If a hacker or some fraudulent employee steals the number, they can't do a thing with it. I love it. The only problems with it are that a couple of places don't work quite right with it. I've heard that AOL has problems with it because they communicate wrong to the shopsafe people different one month from another and it has to be the SAME vendor identifying code sent or the shopsafe thing will reject it. I hear that booking flights through orbitz or something with a name like that ends up causing two charges and the second one with a different vendor (the airline) doesn't go through so the person has to arrange to do another generated number for the second one after the screw up. But for most situations, it works without a hitch. It can have up to a one year limit and most vendors can do a monthly billing (like if you have to pay an IP $99 a year in monthly increments, you set a $99 limit and it bills $7.95 a month automatically, unless it's a problem place like AOL). I wouldn't even think of doing internet stuff any other way.

The only place I could be hurt is if they successfully hack the bank running the program and get the real card number. But that's the only place online that has my true card number. No vendor has it or ever will. I used to do phone orders with my real card, but no more.

p.s. about the previous thread, yes, you'll get postal spam when you register for a political party. However, I put a stop to it by insisting they only send it to me via email. Somehow or another it worked after I bitched enough. I have an email addy where I receive such stuff. A ton of it, mind you.
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Besides Amex, MBNA also does it. Not sure how many credit card banks do. -lisa