TechVirtuoso

Dude, I hope you didn’t get a Dell

0 Comments July 1, 2010 : By Frank Owen · Category : News

Until the last few years I was a big Dell supporter. I recommended Dell to the majority of my business clients as well as anyone looking for a home machine. At the time I had no problems with the brand and they were usually one of the low price leaders in their class. I had clients buy Servers, Monitors and Desktops without blinking an eye.

I have noticed over the years the same customers I gave my recommendation to were complaining about increased problems but I just shrugged it off. I then was given 30 machines from around 1999 – 2001 to build a temporary training class with, half HP, Half Dell. I had problems with almost each one of the Dell’s. Everything from not posting to the heat sink clip being broken. The HP’s also had a couple of issues but not near as many as the Dell’s.

I thought at the time it might have been a coincidence, until my company decided to buy 500 off lease Dell GX260’s for a fresh build out. I was horrified, not because they were Dell’s but because they were old and ratty. We made due with what we were given and put them out to production and have seen nothing but issues. Everything from BIOS batteries going out to smoke coming out of the power supply. We have between 4 – 6 of these off lease Dell’s go bad every month and at least 2 of them have “caught fire” from the power supply.

Now I hear that Dell knowingly covered up that they sold faulty motherboards? Not just one or two, but 11.8 million!  How can I recommend for anyone to get a Dell product when they try to sweep this under the rug? How am I to know that they didn’t cover up a faulty power supply design in the GX260’s that we have so many issues with and they just haven’t been caught yet?

If you are looking for a new build out of any type I would steer clear of Dell, I know I will be for quite some time.

Microsoft CES keynote fails to excite

0 Comments January 7, 2010 : By Michael Stanclift · Category : CES

If you couldn’t get a chance to watch the Microsoft CES pre-show keynote last night, you didn’t miss much. If you were actually at the event, I feel sorry for you, it must have been hard to stay awake.

After starting late due to power issues (which fried one of the Microsoft demo units on stage) the keynote got off to a rather boring start with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, giving various statistics about how well recently released products like Windows 7 and Bing are doing. For the first half hour, the audio stream for the webcast was so bad, it kept cutting out and then required constant volume adjustment. Note to Microsoft, hire a decent sound engineer next time.

If you’d like to watch the keynote for yourself, you can see the saved version on the Microsoft website.

It was all pretty much downhill from there. The much discussed “Courier” tablet that many in the tech press was excited they would announce never came, and there were no details about Windows Mobile 7… at all. Only “we’ll have more about mobile at Mobile World Congress.” So overall, the keynote failed to deliver much of anything that we didn’t know or have not seen already. But, here is a breakdown of what was covered, after the break.

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Intel posts better than expected third quarter results. Is the tech sector picking up?

0 Comments August 28, 2009 : By Shane Pitman · Category : News

Intel_logo_3Analysts and financiers have been ever so carefully watching quarterly reports from industry leaders for most of the year in an effort to gauge the economy and its effect on technology markets as a whole. The news has been a veritable see-saw of ups and downs, but for Intel at least, things appear to be on the rise, as their third quarter revenue and gross margin expectations have been raised a half a billion dollars from $8.5 billion to $9.0 billion, down from $10.2 billion reported for the third quarter in 2008.

While this news is positive, it doesn’t hold true across the board for the technology sector. Earlier this week Dell reported drops in quarterly sales and profits, but echoed the sentiments of competitor and world’s largest PC maker, Hewlett-Packard, that the technology markets seemed to be stabilizing.

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