The rest of us want to believe too?

Oh please.

Dell = cheap and nasty mediocrity farmed out to those who know no better.

It makes me smile to know that Michael will be losing so much of his own money over the next few years as Dell disappears into obscurity.

This also ran will be hit hard by Apple over the coming years.

Sell your shares back to the shareholders Dell Boy.

Your luck is running out.

The turn around since big Mick took the reins again is clear for all to see, Dell offer affordable desktops and laptops to the masses as well as taylored server solutions for business. Dell aint going anywhere but up so if you cant beat them join! It happened to MS for years people think they are the corporate enemy but we live in a consumer world where choice is the drive and people like to pay less for quick solutions that work!

Yep couldn't agree more except that Apple will end up in the position enjoyed (or perhaps thats not the right phrase) by MS for so long, that is, hated monopoly.

I'd love nothing more than to see your fortune wiped out. Seriously, I despise Dell even more than I despise Ballmer.

Dell are a good make for business. Thankfully they dont load those machines with too much Crap ware.

So, if Dell gets any really positive news in the short term future, and the shares go up substantially, does that mean this is an act of Insider Trading?

all the recent Dell PC's and laptops that ive seen are very well designed put together, and were very reasonable prices. The business laptops seem to be better than the home ones.

You can get a basic Vista Business Slim desktop for £200. You would struggle to make it for that money and with Dell you have support.

Keep drinking that kool-aid guys, the day big businesses buy Xserves to run their generic enterprise apps is the day Jobs turns his RDF up to 11.

I guess you're just a little bit more susceptible to that kind of bullshit than the rest of us...

I must confess that I've found no problems with my Dell purchases. Yes, you get what you pay for but at the end of the day, I want a machine that works and runs reasonably and not a fashionable item. Yes, their extras are a bit overpriced but as all their kit are assembled from bog-standard parts, there is nothing stopping you from going elsewhere for upgrades.

You also get a tested configuration and a warranty to boot. OK, their Support Centre in India is a complete joke but if you get through to Ireland, you get decent service. Their Business range of kit is very acceptable and it appears that you automatically get routed to Dublin if you had purchased one of their Business range.

You even get the freedom to remove the dreaded Vista and install something sensible like Linux without invalidating your warranty. It's just a pity they don't offer the option of a no O/S installed machine. That would up their credibility.

Give them a break guys. They are nowhere as bad as the M word as some people make them out to be.

I'm probably out of the loop, but why are Dell so bad? I bought a home computer from them a few weeks ago (from the business Vostro line, as it suited me better), and I'm happy with it. Yes, I could probably have spent a few weeks researching and putting together something cheaper, but for 'out of the box' they seem to have some good offerings.

I called their Poweredge support the other day also, and I felt they were pretty good - not too much waiting at all to get through to someone knowledgeable.

Eh?

I can honestly say that while I have bought machines from other companies that have promptly failed within a year. Then I bought Dell machines and even the laptop has been running strong with little fault (most of which was my own stupid fault) and the desktop is the most reliable machine I have ever had.

Many, many bad experiences with Dell; servers delivered with several incompatible components inside which simply would not run at all unless you removed one of the controller cards were just the beginning. The next thing were a bunch of workstations delivered with components not as ordered (and a lame "we didn't have them at hand, so we put in the other thing instead." Well, Dell, I would have been willing to wait a few days in order to get what I had actually ordered... as my company would then have been able to actually use the bloody things. When you're in a somewhat specialized branch of the graphics industry, sometimes it just _has_ to be an Adaptec SCSI card. Because the high-end scanners we used at the time for some reason didn't like QLogic and AMD SCSI chipsets.

Service calls tended to route one around through four or five stations and usually didn't get quick results; I don't know whether they've become better at this since 2005.

And so on; the list of grievances I have had with Dell over the last decade is quite long and the list of success stories, short. I guess YMMV and many people have no bad experiences with Dell. I hear that for simple tasks like word processing, they're OK. As for me, I watched several server setups in several industries chuck their Dell boxes to the advantage of a variety of other vendors for basically the same reasons. They may be cheap, but they're also shite seemed to be the general consensus.

And just to consternate the AC from 09:27 GMT above, actually two of the setups I mentioned (one in pre-press, the other an engineering bureau) threw out their Dells to replace them with XServes. AFAIK, they're still quite happy with them.

Just wanted to mention I'm in the process of ordering a Dell R300 and I've selected the option (from the configurator) to have no OS installed.

I've had plenty of dealings with Dell machines. My senior school bought 150 of them in my last few years there. Ran NT4 fine, and Windows 2000 (on netware :S network) even better. I have a P3 500 optiplex at home which is a fantastic fallback machine (and actually ran a mission-critical service at a radio station when their main streamer kept falling over).

Said radio station is pretty much entirely a dell house (mixture of new and ebay-sourced jobbies), all rock solid. We bought some of the Vostro slim towers to run a new phone system (needs 3 machines) with XP instead of Vista and had them setup in a couple of hours (including networking tweaks, services optimisations et al). Not too much crapware either.

Home machine is an ebay D2400 - very happy, although fitting my DVD burner into it was a pain.

All you've done now is give 09:27 AC a reason to believe that Steve's reality distortion field is now at eleven. Not that it makes any sense whatsoever to say that as Apple's products become more used, Steve's attempts to make them seem relevant require more effort rather than less.

Anyway, Apple obviously have nothing to do with this story. I'd imagine Dell's real problems are that once the prices drop as low as they have now, quite a few people start making impulse purchases, and those favour the companies that do single configuration boxes with maybe one interesting quirk and ship them in high volume to non-PC specialist shops. Like those pink Medion laptops in Woolworths. Or whatever Tesco are offering this week.

Your comment regarding the clients who replaced their Dell's with Xserves doesn't exactly go into specifics does it?

Were the old boxes past their support life (i.e. they were P3's), did the Xserves fill a niche gap in their infrastructure (running some king of rendering farm etc?), basically your comment is just FUD^H^H^H^shit.

I've configured 100's of Dell's, HP's, IBMs and I've yet to experience one issue where one of them weren't able to respond quickly and effectively to an issue I've had.

Mistakes happen, but over the course of my 15 years of professional experience only a handful of times have I had an issue they haven't fixed (and they were IBMs).

Besides if you reckon you can do a better job at cost then why don't you build your own machines? Twat.

Someone mentioned the Dublin server support team earlier, I've had many many dealings with these guys (usually due to my own cak-handed incompantence when called out at 3am)

I've nothing but praise for them, they even call back when they say they will and DO seem to give a shit.

I've not tried Dell home support, but having started IT on a helpdesk for Mesh Computers, I can understand thos guys getting sloppy, especially when the average person phoning up finds it hard to swap channels on the TV

I'm curious as to why there's so much dislike of Dell. I'm not being smart - I genuinely wonder. I mean, I've got a couple of venerable Dell GX1s that are doing fine and have been through a couple of Dell laptops at work (sounds misleading; my D600 was retired and replaced while it was in perfect working order, and I'm still working on the second!). Again, no problems with the laptops. Not exactly oozing style and solid quality but they work fine (my old D600 was a hand-me-down when I got it, and survived two falls while running in the time I had it without a hiccup) and you can't argue with the prices.

"why don't you build your own machines? Twat."

Well, if answering ad hominem and calling people twats to make your point is your level of competence, then I can see why you're posting anonymously. And I don't need to build systems myself (I could, but not at cost -- volume buying, see?) if I can order them at cost from a variety of companies other than Dell. And I can and do.

As for the details on the switches to XServe, the pre-press business had heat and maintenance issues with their Dells, possibly related. After several replacements, they decided to try something else. The engineering firm had wanted to switch to a unified server platform to save on maintenance, tried a rackful of brand-new Dell units and decided to hand them back after having found them to be wanting in several areas, including performance per watt and maintenance cost. They ran their PPC970 XServes on Debian GNU/Linux, last I heard.

I hope this satisfies your need for specifics.

"... over the course of my 15 years of professional experience only a handful of times have I had an issue they haven't fixed (and they were IBMs)."

Interestingly, I have always found IBM's service to be quick, friendly and thorough on the very rare occasions that I actually needed it, which is more than I can say for my experience with Dell. HP I have usually found satisfactory. Sun has set up a service bureaucracy that is almost impossible to penetrate at times; try getting a price quote on a spare part from them without signing an order form...

Just FYI, I am not a particular fan or antagonist of any platform or hardware supplier. I use what works. If something doesn't, I go get something that does.

Ta