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

[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.