Dell giving me runaround... help on spec

Dime_Bar

I quite happly come on here on a XP1700 or even a P3-800mhz, when I get my freecycle 133MMX up and running I dare say I will be coming here too. I dont use windows on these though.

Anyway the point of my post, I am a heavy computer user I dont play games but do alot of webbased stuff and my Top Spec Machine is a Sepron 2600 with 1Gb of Ram and I have never found it wanting.

Although with all the rubbish that dell ship on there machines who knows ;-)

epz_2

Dime_Bar wrote: »

I quite happly come on here on a XP1700 or even a P3-800mhz, when I get my freecycle 133MMX up and running I dare say I will be coming here too. I dont use windows on these though.

Anyway the point of my post, I am a heavy computer user I dont play games but do alot of webbased stuff and my Top Spec Machine is a Sepron 2600 with 1Gb of Ram and I have never found it wanting.

Although with all the rubbish that dell ship on there machines who knows ;-)

snap, i develop and run big databases, compile plenty of code and lots of high end stuff and do it mostly on my 512meg laptop.

re the 133mmx be carefull if you plan on running linux, a LOT of big distros are dumping 586 backward compatibility, youll probably need to stick with slack or god help you gentoo

motorguy

epz wrote: »

didnt mean to call it a highend server but it is more than capable of running a good sized sme

dont know what businesses you manage servers for, but ive admined ones for HSBC, RBS, HBOS, tescos, and several power companies. clustering is used for redundancy but 3.6ghz equivelent single threaded cpu is plenty for most stuff as network latency and disk io kicks in well before cpu or ram.

that said we set them up properly so rather than having bells and whistles they did the job they needed to.

A similar background to myself then, managing servers and databases for BT for 3 years, Abbey for 7 years, and more recently for a 2000 seat contact centre. I also owned a PC support company for a while too. Currently technology manager for a company.

Maybe a decent Intel 3.6Ghz single processor in a server, but definitely not a Sempron. It was never meant for the server market.

Besides, we're not talking about big servers here, its home laptops. We sold similar Dells last year - probably a good 200-250 - i think they were called the 1501 then, and the entry level one was a Sempron. They just ran slow. Unacceptably slow when you put any sort of pressure on them at all - antivirus, office, antispyware. Noticably slower than the next processor up which cost just £20 more. We just stopped buying them as they just didnt make financial sense compared to the Turion processors.

The sempron based ones are built down to a price to be 'headline grabbers' every thursday in the Sun and other tabloids.

I'll stick by my 'find the extra £50 or regret it later' but each to their own.

motorguy

epz wrote: »

snap, i develop and run big databases, compile plenty of code and lots of high end stuff and do it mostly on my 512meg laptop.

I guess you dont 'run' the databases on it, you're probably remoting on to the machine thats actually doing the work, compiling isnt that resource heavy, and i'd also hazard a guess you're not running vista....

motorguy

Dime_Bar wrote: »

I quite happly come on here on a XP1700 or even a P3-800mhz. I dont use windows on these though.

Although with all the rubbish that dell ship on there machines who knows ;-)

Is the o/p's post not about potentially buying a vista machine, something known to be resource heavy? I have an old IBM Pc thats runing Ubuntu beautifully, but i wouldnt think of putting XP or Vista on it.

Yes, the amount of 'three months free trial' gunk on them is horrifying. Plus they generally come with Norton or McAfee :eek:

Dime_Bar

As for 586 compatibility, I have no problems I use Puppy linux on such machines.

re the Dell 3 month stuff, we buy our machines that we supply to our clients from Dell and the first thing we do is reinstall XP to get rid of it all.

motorguy

custardy wrote: »

3 minutes is nonsense.
im running a pc here with a lower spec sempron but 2 gigs of ram on xp(previously 512mb) and its never taken that long lol

you can get the ram for half the price from crucial

3 minutes is a sales pitch! They will also ask you do you not love your kids and want the best for them if it gets them a sale!

I suspect they get bonused on a percentage of what they flog you over the base price. Our Dell account manager said that Dell only made a few £ on the very basic machines and relied on people to up the RAM, hard disks etc to make decent money.

Hence the ability to buy RAM at half the price that dell might charge, although i dont think they are as bad for this as they used to be.

motorguy

Dime_Bar wrote: »

As for 586 compatibility, I have no problems I use Puppy linux on such machines.

re the Dell 3 month stuff, we buy our machines that we supply to our clients from Dell and the first thing we do is reinstall XP to get rid of it all.

Yeah especially if you are buying a batch it makes sense to build an image and roll it out across them all. Its time up front but worthwhile

epz_2

pgilc1 wrote: »

I guess you dont 'run' the databases on it, you're probably remoting on to the machine thats actually doing the work, compiling isnt that resource heavy, and i'd also hazard a guess you're not running vista....

nope i run db's locally as in i have snapshots of tables etc on my local machine for developing test queries etc, its running a tweeked gentoo optimised to a highish level with very little of the usual distro guff installed.

i wasnt sudgesting the op should run a server off the laptop but a lot more high level stuff runs on lower end kit than that, id take a sepmron over an sub 2ghz p4 based xeon with slow ecc memory for a lot of stuff most. to say noncense like 3 mins to load a web page is a total joke.

there is always going to be something faster, last time looked at upgradeing my medea server pc i ended uo on ebay looking at a 64cpu rackmount spark thinking well its only 3k and i could fit it in the garage, good enough is fine for most people. hell if it ant fast enough in 2 years £50 will probably be half the price of a new lappy up to the job by then.

/me thankfull ive got an irish dell account manger whos compitant.


edit, did you say abbey, part of nationwide. lol i saw one of their branches having the whole branch gateway, printers domain, the lot running through a P3 last year.

Donnie

1jim wrote: »

the op's experience is similar to mine a year or 2 ago when I bought one of the dell inspirons, they kept putting the phone down on me and telling me that they had processed the order when they hadnt, also told me that would be unable to surf the internet on the basic spec model.
In the end I got so fed up with it that I told the salesman that I was recording the call and that any failure to provide the computer at the price advertised or if the phone was put down on me/fake order taken that I would send a copy of the recording to the cheif exec, trading standards and all newspapers throughout the uk.......suprise suprise managed to get the laptop without any problems.... its still going strong (although battery nearing end of life so might invest in new laptop given the cost of batteries),

I get my laptop batteries cells replaced. Paid less than thirty pounds.

How much were you quoted for new?