lol @ dell

[greenaccord02]

The 280s were kind of hit and miss. Some of our buildings had 200 or 300 of them and very few failures, but some got a bad batch and up to 60% of the boxes failed. Every time, it was the same. Bulging, leaking caps. The real pain was that the ram would get uneven voltages from the bad caps and it would fail, too. The desktops were the main victims of this, because their heat sinks were made with fins that clogged very easily and caused case temperatures to rise well outside of what were acceptable ranges. The towers didn't have this problem. We had about 20,000 GX280s.

To those of you who still have your 280s - open the box up and look at the tall caps around the processor and ram. If these are black with a gold/bronze looking stripe, they're suseptible to failure. If they have a silver looking stripe, they're either the remanufactured boards (common) or they're from a series that used good caps.

 

[PandaBear]

Used to work at SanDisk and Maxtor and both used DELL and they seems to be fine. Like ToyotaNSaturn said it is an industry wide problem and I also see more HP personal laptop went bad than DELL.

One thing I was wondering is how can something like a server be sourced with Chinese caps that blown? Instead of letting their vendor do the sourcing and designing, they should have source their own parts from the manufacturers instead of distributors.

Cousin in law works in Lite On and he said the customer (DELL, HP, etc) went to smaller parts distributors instead of directly to manufacturers because the paying period is usually 180 days instead of 30 days. In a way it becomes a free loan at a slightly higher expense of parts (about 1% per month). Once in a while they get fake Chinese knock off instead of the real thing, oops.

 

[SLCraig]

I don't like Dell laptops from a build quality stand point but dont seem to have any more problems than any other brand. Toshiba on the other hand you couldn't pay me to own.

Want a good notebook? Thinkpad.

I have however had relatively good luck with Dell small business computer systems. Our current fleet of PCs at work are Dell OptiPlex SFF systems and all run pretty good minus the odd HD or PSU failure (expected) No other issues.

 

[saberz]

Really depends on when you bought a Dell. In the 90's they were fantastic machines, 2000-2007 were their horrible years. 2008-2009 has been better. I am usually an Acer fan since their machines are very easy to work on(laptops). The Dell's even to this day are a bit tough, and their technicians are worse.

My brother bought one shortly after I did and had some problems and they tore it apart and fixed an issue with the unit. Then the machine wouldn't charge and the guy wouldn't come out until a few days later. So I opened the machine(easy peasy to bypass their "tamper" checks. They didn't re-attach the cord to the power input on the board. Either case I had it up and running so he could use it, then set it loose again an hour before the guy came and demanded they supply a new laptop(this was the 4th service call in a month).

They put up a fight, but speaking to CS I put the tech and the company in their place and he got a new replacement with better specs than before. Trouble free since!

I will tell you from a reliability and repairability perspective avoid the following.

-Sony Vaio - Life style machines. If it looks nifty and complicated its problematic. I had to service those all in one units(monitor and pc in-one with a pop out KB). All of them had issues with heat generation causing HDD failures. Tearing them apart to get at the HDD's was like open heart surgery.

-Sony Vaio Laptops - Think apple pricing, with the cheapest parts. They may have improved since 2006, but before then nightmares to work on and disassemble for repairs.

-HP laptops(recently) poor build quality, flaky hardware. Most units had disappearing hardware from the Windows Device Manager. Boards would get replaced frequently.

-Fujitsu Lifebooks. Biggest pieces of you know what. Touchscreens, keyboards and HDD's have a VERY high failure rate. You usually see these in the pharmaceutical field(which I service). No airflow in the mini Lifebooks, just a closed laptop unit with an Atom or C2D processor.


Recommend:

Acer laptops, cheap replacement parts, easy to add memory, HDD and upgrade CPU's, add Bluetooth etc.

Dell - Vostro 1500+ series are reliable, mileage will vary on ease of access to components. Vostro 1500 for instance has a memory slot underneath the laptop that is easily accessible. To get the other memory slot you have to pop out the keyboard to reach the 2nd.

Alienware - still pretty good, pricey though.

 

[Hermann]

Never had a Bad Dell. We are on #7,8 and 9 at this time. Not that they have been problem free, but the hardware has alway been bulletproof. YMMV

 

[brianl703]

Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
If these are black with a gold/bronze looking stripe, they're suseptible to failure.


If they say Nichicon that is true.

I have a GX280 I bought as a refurb for $50 that has capacitors which are black with a gold stripe, but they are made by Panasonic/Matsushita. They were most likely replaced by someone other than Dell.

 

[occupant]

It's completely hit or miss. GX260's are great. GX270's have capacitor issues. D620 laptops are great, the D600 and D610 are cheap. I don't know what to think of newer models but they sure are cheap and that can only mean they're made by the lowest bidder, so I'll pass.

I'm a very cheap person. My wallet has a padlock on it. But at this point I would rather have an Acer/eMachines/Gateway system than anything else. I'm 4 for 4 on good systems from them, whereas I'm 3 for 6 from Dell. I haven't owned an HP for a long time, though, but I have heard both really great and really horrible things about them. I will stick to Gateway's line of products for now.

My Acer laptop (that I use as a desktop) allows me to do everything I need to do. I'm eight months into owning it and it feels just as fast as the day I dropped a T4300 CPU and a 3rd GB of RAM in it (which was the week after I got it).

My wife's system is a whitebox setup (Antec p182 case, Foxconn FlamingBlade mb, i7-920 at 3.6GHz, 6GB of triple-channel memory, XFX HD4890 video, 24" NEC display) and she LOVES it. When she needs more speed than she has now, she'll have me build her another one an order of magnitude faster. Six-core probably, I could crank a 1090T up to 4GHz and give her two 5750's or something.

My kids are using my old eMachines EL1200 desktop with a single core Athlon 64 2650e (1.6GHz). It's slow, it's clunky, it has XP Home on it, and it was for a time the $198 Wal-Mart loss leader. I paid $215 with a 19" LCD, webcam, and it was six months old used sparingly by some grandma who loaded it up with viruses. My wife and I cleaned it out, restored the OS, put 3GB of memory in and it seems speedy enough for what they do (flash games, kids websites, some late 90s early 00s games). If they want more I can do the CPU swap thing (looking at some 4850e's now) and maybe drop in a video card in the PCI slot. In straight up PCI (not Express) I can get HD4350, HD4550, HD5450, or an nVidia 9500GT (the mb uses a 6150SE chipset, I'll probably go this route) and they're all $60 or less.

But I digress. Toms is the place to discuss such things. But I will say the Acer (my last Aspire 5920, my current Extensa 5230E), eMachines (EL1200, D620 laptop my daughter has), and Gateway (ML6230 laptop I had before the Aspire and the 600YGR my wife had a few years back) products we've owned have been top-notch.

 

[crinkles]

Originally Posted By: PandaBear
Used to work at SanDisk and Maxtor and both used DELL and they seems to be fine. Like ToyotaNSaturn said it is an industry wide problem and I also see more HP personal laptop went bad than DELL.

One thing I was wondering is how can something like a server be sourced with Chinese caps that blown? Instead of letting their vendor do the sourcing and designing, they should have source their own parts from the manufacturers instead of distributors.

Cousin in law works in Lite On and he said the customer (DELL, HP, etc) went to smaller parts distributors instead of directly to manufacturers because the paying period is usually 180 days instead of 30 days. In a way it becomes a free loan at a slightly higher expense of parts (about 1% per month). Once in a while they get fake Chinese knock off instead of the real thing, oops.


i want my money back for the liteon USB dvd writer that just carked it!! out of the blue!