Why you should never buy a dell

[JBroll]

I've never had a problem with hand-built computers, and I go way back with those. I love not having to deal with uninstalling eight copies of Napster, the iTunes propaganda, AOL's trial, NetZero's trial, the shitbox MS Office that the companies push every chance they get, RealPlayer...

I'd love to know what went wrong with yours, Shane, all the ones I've done have been incredible - they ran exactly as I expected them to, if not better, were very easy to overclock, had none of the junk in the background you'll find in most manufacturer PCs...

... and still ran all of my software.

Jeff

 

[Kazrog]

zmetallica - Macs under OS X never need to be restarted if an application crashes, as each app runs in a protected memory space. It's a rare occurence that Mac apps crash, and when they do you can just relaunch the app and keep going. Perhaps you haven't used a Mac since the OS 9 and earlier days? You do realize that Mac OS X is a completely different OS from the ground up, right?

I've found Mac OS X to be infinitely more stable than Windows XP. I regularly do vulgar displays of multitasking, such as using Photoshop and Digital Performer at the same time, etc., with no crashes or problems.

 

[JBroll]

Mmm, Vulgar Displays of Multitasking...

*plays every Pantera song he knows at full speed and volume, all by himself, and all at the same time*

Jeff

 

[SPLASTiK]

You must have done something wrong (like forgotten to add the second processor, etc.) Remember that the Mac Pro is Dual Dual Core! Dell's price is still the same as it was at the time of the MacWorld article. A lot of other publications found the same results, so don't just take it from MacWorld or me. I wonder if Dell's going to readjust the pricing to compete with Apple - will be interesting to see.

It was late The second processor drop down menu was minimized

It's kind of strange and I wonder if Dell will drop prices... The Laptops are in a competive range though, not a huge difference like this.

 

[Kazrog]

It was late The second processor drop down menu was minimized

It's kind of strange and I wonder if Dell will drop prices... The Laptops are in a competive range though, not a huge difference like this.

Your discovery is pretty amazing though - you can cut the speed of the Dell in HALF and still pay $400 more!!

I'm trying right now to make a Dell laptop that's cheaper than a Mac laptop and it's impossible. I went for entry level machines (well... not ghetto Celerons, but Apple would never go there, and I hope none of you do), Dell's favorite market - MacBook vs. XPS M1210, customized both to identical specs, MacBook comes out $56 cheaper.

 

[MKS]

I tell you one thing. The Dell site UI is atrocious. Fucking awful.

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

I tell you one thing. The Dell site UI is atrocious. Fucking awful.

Yes! Why did they do that?!!uke: :zombie:

 

[SPLASTiK]

Your discovery is pretty amazing though - you can cut the speed of the Dell in HALF and still pay $400 more!!

Yeah, that is pretty crazy... I really wonder why the Dell is so much more...

I hate the Dell UI too... You choose Home Laptops... Click the XPS, Click Choose this model, then they send you to a page talking about all the benchmarks and crap... Then you click Customise It, then you have to choose which XPS model you really want... yadda yadda it's like a never ending menu

 

[Kazrog]

I tell you one thing. The Dell site UI is atrocious. Fucking awful.

Yeah as a professional UI designer I don't understand why Dell has such horrible UI. I'm still confused as to why I have to select between, Home, Small Business, Medium & Large Business, Government & Healthcare. Why can't my pricing and options be dictated by my order quantity, etc.? I just don't get it. I just want to get to the god damn machines!!

And trying to customize the PCs is confusing, as the order of options is often not related in any way whatsoever to their cost/quality.

 

[MKS]

Yeah as a professional UI designer I don't understand why Dell has such horrible UI. I'm still confused as to why I have to select between, Home, Small Business, Medium & Large Business, Government & Healthcare. Why can't my pricing and options be dictated by my order quantity, etc.? I just don't get it. I just want to get to the god damn machines!!

And trying to customize the PCs is confusing, as the order of options is often not related in any way whatsoever to their cost/quality.

They make it so fucking difficult to pick a PC with exactly what a consumer wants. The Dell site at one time was extremely easy to navigate. It's like I need to know a secret fucking handshake to pick what I want.

 

[zmetallica]

zmetallica - Macs under OS X never need to be restarted if an application crashes, as each app runs in a protected memory space. It's a rare occurence that Mac apps crash, and when they do you can just relaunch the app and keep going. Perhaps you haven't used a Mac since the OS 9 and earlier days? You do realize that Mac OS X is a completely different OS from the ground up, right?

I've found Mac OS X to be infinitely more stable than Windows XP. I regularly do vulgar displays of multitasking, such as using Photoshop and Digital Performer at the same time, etc., with no crashes or problems.

hehe yeah thats what they are SUPPOSED to do, but the macs in the photo/video lab at my school i've worked on plenty of times for classes act up all the time. and yes they are OSX. OS 9 was horrid though, so it is an improvement. hell the mac would freeze on the login screen.

remember that you have to consider the amount of power the machine is using. in my experience i find that macs require more power for simple tasks. this is probably why IBM's kick ass chips never made it to windows PCs.
right now i am recording a song idea in nuendo, on IM, firefox, word, finale, sound forge, winamp, and thats not even including the tons of programs i'm doing in the background. i'm running an AMD 3800 X2. running on a P4 1.4ghz i was able to do these same tasks easily. with macs i find that it doesn't handle too well with background services as windows does.
none the less, OSX is a great OS comparable to windows, but it has severe bugs that need to be worked out. not to say windows has bugs, they are just not as severe. i hate windows and MS as much as the next guy, but i don't think OSX is better. i really don't see any perfect OS out there, but hey maybe macs will triumph in the end, just need to work out some OS issues... the crashes i've experienced with the mac are OS related outside software problems, which is most of what windows deals with.

 

[Ermz]

zmetallica - Macs under OS X never need to be restarted if an application crashes, as each app runs in a protected memory space. It's a rare occurence that Mac apps crash, and when they do you can just relaunch the app and keep going. Perhaps you haven't used a Mac since the OS 9 and earlier days? You do realize that Mac OS X is a completely different OS from the ground up, right?

I've had ProTools HD crash while running on a Dual G5. There was no other option but to restart, through which all updates to the session after the last save were lost. This doesn't include all the times that the machine has randomly restarted, at times halfway through a tracking session.

I refuse to believe that OS X and Mac computers are this infallible beast that they're made out to be by enthusiasts. My XP machine runs about as stable as the OS X machine does down in the studio. I believe with all computers the key word is 'maintenance' and knowing how to utilize each to its potential.

 

[Kazrog]

I've had ProTools HD crash while running on a Dual G5. There was no other option but to restart, through which all updates to the session after the last save were lost. This doesn't include all the times that the machine has randomly restarted, at times halfway through a tracking session.

I refuse to believe that OS X and Mac computers are this infallible beast that they're made out to be by enthusiasts. My XP machine runs about as stable as the OS X machine does down in the studio. I believe with all computers the key word is 'maintenance' and knowing how to utilize each to its potential.

Yeah I hear what you're saying, and it would sound like wisdom, except that I've never had that problem with PTHD on a G5, and I've spent countless hours on it. Sounds like bad RAM, faulty motherboard, or a physically damaged hard disk to me.

I say this because there was a time when I had a faulty stick of RAM in my G4, and it was doing things like this, before it finally just died on me, at which point OS X let me know to remove it, and told me what DIMM slot it was in. Never buy knockoff Chinese RAM!

 

[Kenneth R.]

Dells are the worst computers I have ever touched. They use them in ALL the labs at my University, and I'm just glad I never bought one.

 

[zmetallica]

I've had ProTools HD crash while running on a Dual G5. There was no other option but to restart, through which all updates to the session after the last save were lost. This doesn't include all the times that the machine has randomly restarted, at times halfway through a tracking session.

I refuse to believe that OS X and Mac computers are this infallible beast that they're made out to be by enthusiasts. My XP machine runs about as stable as the OS X machine does down in the studio. I believe with all computers the key word is 'maintenance' and knowing how to utilize each to its potential.

wow thats even more extreme than i've ever experienced. I agree it is how well you maintain the computer. I find XP much easier to configure settings and maintain and adjust specific options. Still neither compares to linix's customization ability, but for me thats too detailed where I feel I'll break it by altering a setting.

 

[_RiseInside_]

Yeah I hear what you're saying, and it would sound like wisdom, except that I've never had that problem with PTHD on a G5, and I've spent countless hours on it. Sounds like bad RAM, faulty motherboard, or a physically damaged hard disk to me.

I say this because there was a time when I had a faulty stick of RAM in my G4, and it was doing things like this, before it finally just died on me, at which point OS X let me know to remove it, and told me what DIMM slot it was in. Never buy knockoff Chinese RAM!

yes it might have been a bad component. What i don´t get is why doesn´t the same argument apply to PCs when there´s something wrong with them. It´s always windows fault. You have a great experience with mac. That´s fine. Well, I have a 16 year great experience with pcs. I can draw a line here: computer-experience sure gets computer working better . I´m not a mac basher. I bought a macbook one month ago. The two macs i had worked with ( two g4 ) crashed from time to time. I like my macbook a lot. i use os X as much as windows. It works great. Nevertheless there´s something bugging me: the shutdown plus closing the lid. It´s a very serious issue that i´ve never seen on a pc. It happenend to me once just like in this report: http://www.rebol.net/article/0283.html I don´t wan´t to fuel another boring mac Vs. Pc fight. Actually i would like to know if it happened to you. The bloody shutdown problem.

 

[SPLASTiK]

...

Update your firmware for the macbook yet? Apparently they just released an update on Thursday which took care of a few bugs and heat/fan related issues.

 

[_RiseInside_]

Update your firmware for the macbook yet? Apparently they just released an update on Thursday which took care of a few bugs and heat/fan related issues.

yap, the smc firmware update. done last week. From what i read over the net it´s a problem that comes long way back ( prior to ibook time) and it´s not fan related. Ordering it to shutdown, the screen goes black, one shuts the lid and that gives the order to sleep. Shutdown plus sleep makes the computer crashe. That´s what happened once with mine. When i got back home it was burning hot, the screen was black (i thought so) and it was still on. Getting reaaaaaaallly close to the screen there was a message. It was so faded, almost unreadable..something like "the computer didn´t shutdown properly, please shutdown manually". Right now i´m going to do the same thing and see if it crashes again.

edit: yap it crashed, just like the other day. I´ll just deactivate the sleep mode, if possible and what i started doing as good practice is to wait until the computer turns off completely before shutting the lid.

 

[johnjm22]

Comparing a Mac Pro to a Dell is pointless. No audio/video professional who is on the PC platform is gonna buy a Dell. Pro PC users run custom setups.

Try comparing a custom quad Opteron setup to the Mac Pro 2.66. The performance will be about the same, only the PC will be considerably cheaper.

Doing the now famous DUC "Quadzilla Dverb Test," a Quad 270 setup maxed out at 161 Dverbs, while a Mac Pro 2.66 maxed out at 155 Dverbs. And keep in mind an Opteron 270 is only 2.0GHz. I imagine an Opteron 285 would similarly outperform a 3.0 Mac Pro, and again be cheaper.

With all this being said, I still love Macs. I own one, and it's rock solid. I think Macs have thier advantages over PCs, but PCs have certain advantages over Macs. All and all the platforms are equal IMO. It really just comes down to the user and what he/she wants. For some PC's may be the better option, while for others Mac is the way to go.

I grow tired of Mac users snobbish attitudes, and ridicoulous claims.