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

[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.