  Right. I'm tired, and have a headache. So, in an effort to make it a whole lot worse, I'm going to go nasty. Really nasty , and have a good rant at one of my least favourite companies. In fact, most of the list below (in yesterday's post) is comprised of companies I don't like *cough* EA *cough* Microsoft *cough*. Dell , one of the largest computer hardware producing companies in the world.
There are few who do not know of the mighty Dell, few who have never had any dealings with said company, and few who, after the aforementioned dealings, are actually satisfied with the service received. Wow, that sentence just killed a few neurones. Anyway, Dell. The pros... (I begin with the pros because I don't want to seem biased. I am biased, so there is little point, however I'm going to do it anyway. You don't like it?
Sod you. ) Good Stuff: Ah, shit... there must be something. OK. They are big. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean they are good, but it does mean that they are somewhat unlikely to take your credit details and bugger off to Siberia. In other words, you are probably safe ordering from them, you can send the crap back, after all.
You get to choose which bits you want, even in laptops. That is good, however the system is not perfect. Exhausted by the mental strain of attempting to think of good stuff... I give up. Bad Stuff: (Get ready, it's a biggie) Prices - Not insanely high, but not exactly good value for money either. Support - Crap.
Total Crap. Really. I mean it. Want support? Ask a dustbin. Or a toilet, perhaps.
They do this odd thing... They modify your hardware, (graphics card, more particularly) and make it a "Dell" version. That means that no drivers other than those issued by the bad-boy programmers at Dell will install for your graphics card or other similarly affected chipsets. This means that as soon as Dell decide to stop updating, (they did that with my laptop in Jan. 2002, I bought it in December of said month) I lose driver updates. What made me even more angry (can it be true?!? ) was that they were updating the drivers for my friend's laptop (the 9000 series (I had an 8200)) who had exactly the same card (ATI Radeon 9000).
So, I spent a furious hour extracting (and I don't mean extracting as in Zip file extracting, I mean surgical removal here) the sys and inf files from said friend's laptop, I forced the drivers into the proverbial stomach of Windows (see a really old post, actually). They made this thing dubbed the "Inhibitor chip" which did some nasty things incuding slowing your computer as a whole down a notch, increasing over time, (I don't know much about this... anyone who does, email me, and I'll edit). Anyway, it is evil. They support urlLink TCPA. I can't be bothered to explain, I really can't. I might in a new post, at some point.
Their website, see "real life stories" below. There is other stuff, but I be tired (it's 10:35 now, and I need to... well, I'm not going to go to bed for ages, but I need to do something else) Real Life Stories: This will be updated in the near future, as will the above, however I have one little snippit of joy for you all: I was just walking along the street, when, entirely unprevokocated, I was attacked... Ah, sorry, that's the script to the ClaimsDirect advert... OK, here we are... The Dell website was being difficult, and I was annoyed about the whole driver issue outlined above, so I sent an email to their complaints department. About 24 hours later, the site blocked me. I couldn't access the Dell website. Other people on other computers could, but whenever the site realised it was me (by entering the service tag on my laptop, or using my laptop to connect) I received a variety of errors.
Hmmmm... Draw your own conclusions. I never received a reply to either the complaint (which was polite and clearly well worded) or the support request I had filed about a month before. Suprrrraaaaase. Time to go, more tomorrow... -- Dom Out 
