Page 1 of Dell laptop advice needed

I`m thinking about buying a laptop and have been checking out the dell website. I like that you can pick and choose what you want and the prices seem competitive enough.

Only problem is i`ve had a number of people warn me off Dell citing anecdotal evidence of a friend of a friend type thing.

Are Dell crap or are they just as good as any other brand?

In my experience, Dell are generally (please note, generally) excellent.

Over the years I`ve bought two desktops and a laptop and they have all performed faultlessly.

The only problem comes with their technical support. The last desktop I ordered was supposed to come with 1.5GB of RAM, but arrived with half of it missing. After three weeks, several emails and a handful of phone calls, I ended up with 1.75GB of RAM in my system and a spare 1GB of RAM in a box.

You see, they sent the wrong RAM chips originally, and said I could keep them as compensation for the hassle.

So I was well pleased, even though it took persistence to get the problem resolved.

It`s the only time I`ve ever had any cause to complain about Dell, though.

When I was at Uni (left 99) we had Dells, they were crap.

Where I used to work (left a few years ago) They bought Dell`s they were crap, wouldn`t touch them with a bardgepole.

They seemed to be put together poorly, preformence was not what should have got for the spec, and they were unreliable.

18months or so ago at my current job, we were told we couldn`t get IBM any more, had to get Dell. We were concerned.

But, so far so good, we have had no problems with laptops or desktops.

Also, the few ppl I know who buy PCs rather than build them have had no problems over last year or so, so I think they may have "cleaned up their act".

2 years ago I wouldn`t have bought one, now I`m considering it.

Al


www.admars.co.uk

This item was edited on Monday, 14th March 2005, 19:23

I bought a secondhand Dell laptop on ebay in 2000 or 2001, it`s still running despite being a pentium 2 and rather slow processor. Touch wood i`ve never had a serious problem with it.

I have the experience of having bought PCs and laptops and having built many PCs.

We got the £184 PC recently for my Nieces and I also bought one of their laptops.

The £184 PC surprised me in that it was so cheap and with an integrated gfx card was still able to smoothly play Sims 2 and GTA 3, plus Unreal Tournament without problems.

The built quality was superb and the whole thing in black looks very nice. When I fitted a wireless PCI card for first PC I opened it, and it was the easiest case I`ve ever opened. Inside was clean and well put together and the whole thing felt solid.

The only thing I didn`t like was all the bumpf installed such as free Internet offers and trial software such as Paint Shop Pro which we didn`t want. No problem because I uninstalled it straight away and tidyed it up.

I have been looking for a decent laptop for a good price and have been very attracted to the prices and offers Dell are running.

I wanted a desktop replacement and eventually liked the look of the Inspiron 5160. It however was more than I wanted to pay. There were cheaper ones but they didn`t offer what I needed. So I left it and the free postage offer ended. Or so I thought. I looked back a few days later and they offered instead double memory of 512 megs, free delivery worth £57 and the March sale of £150 of, so I couldn`t resist.

I am well impressed and love it. I`ve had a Toshiba laptop, and a Thinkpad but this is much better.

For the price it handles wireless internet on a cheapo PCMCIA card no problems. I get 3:45 minutes of battery time, and with a second battery that`s more than enough. It handles all my office needs and because of the Nvidia card I`ve been able to run games such as Vice City and Unreal Tournament easily and smoothly. For the price I`m amazed at getting a 2.8 ghz P4, 40 gig HD, 64 meg Gforce2go gfx and a DVD-RW drive. Windows XP SP2 comes with it too plus Works for Windows.

I liked the build quality and I find the speedstep handles things fine, giving enough power as it`s needed. I`ve played DivX, Xvid and DVDs on it without any problems.

Looking at the other laptops and prices they are selling for I think their value is superb. I`m impressed with the build quality and sales of the Dell machines and given how many I`ve had over the years and built I have to say you get your money`s worth.

I did contact Dell to find out where our £184 PC was and as with both machines we got several telephone calls to confirm our order and for delivery details.

I`d certainly use Dell again and I can say there`s plenty of other companies I wouldn`t.

Hope that info helps some.

D.

This item was edited on Monday, 14th March 2005, 22:56

Bought a Dell Dimension 5000 about 6 weeks ago... its great!
I tried probably 20 different build your own sites, and i couldnt get close to it for price. :)



`I am going to live forever, or die trying`...

I buy Dell at work (unless I`m building a Shuttle) - build quality is good, the PC cases are excellent, the laptops first class and their servers are great also. I`ve found their support to be much better than their competitors (HP are shocking), although they do seem to want to send an engineer out for the slightest thing (like changing a DVD drive).

One word of warning if you are getting a laptop, if you need to replace the screen its a very expensive job. Probably true of all laptop suppliers though.