Dell's Linux, IT Re-Invention

jcatcw writes "An IDG analysis of Dell's attempts to reinvent itself concludes that there are some positive results, but there are problems with the company's supply-chain management and support. One area analysts want to see more improvement: the company's Linux business. 'Jeremy Cole, owner of Proven Scaling, a small consulting firm with offices in the US and UK ... is satisfied with Dell equipment, but said the company needs to show more support for open-source applications and the Linux OS. "It's clear that Dell cares about Linux, in that all their server-class hardware is well-supported by the Linux kernel and they have many people dedicated to making sure that's the case. However, it's not good enough just to boot," Cole said.'"

Consistency

[pickapeppa (731249)]

I buy a lot of computers for work. I work at a charity that has a nifty agreement with Dell that could save me a ton of money. But I stopped buying Dell computers a few years back because I could not get a consistent product from them. I would buy 10 identical computers, open them up and find a zillion different parts from a zillion manufacturers in them. This drives me crazy. I heard tell that Dell was addressing this, but haven't followed up. I switched to Acer a few years back. If Dell wants to sell me computers again they need A. a guarantee that the sub-contracted bits inside are of a consistent quality, and B. a non-Vista option.

Re:Consistency

[h4rr4r (612664)]

You will need to buy the Optiplex line. Just like all the big vendors the consumer grade model varies from batch to batch, only the business line is locked for any real amount of time.

They do sell XP.

Re:Consistency

[mr_mischief (456295)]

...and Linux, which TFA is about. I'd call that a "non-Vista option".

Also, if someone has an OS preference and is the IT department or has purchasing power in the IT department, one should be able to install the preferred OS. Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Suse, OpenSuse, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, eComStation, QNX, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and probably a hundred other non-Vista OS distributions will install on most Dell server and desktop systems.

If world-class OS support is necessary, it's probably best to sign a contract with an OS vendor or a third party specializing in supporting the OS. Depending on a hardware vendor to support the OS is kind of risky anyway.

I've had RedHat and Mandriva on lots of PowerEdge and Optiplex systems, and I've never gotten Dell's permission or asked them for support. The only companies that make hardware that should be your final stop for supporting software are companies like IBM, Sun, SGI, or Apple that make the hardware and software both.

Re:

[TheLinuxSRC (683475)]

I agree with you to a point, however I ran into a *hardware* problem a few years ago with a Dell Dimension (it was a P3 to give you the timeframe). The Dell representative refused support after learning that Linux had been run on the system. For the record, this was a power supply and the machine would not even powerup. I am still not sure how that had anything to do with Linux.

As a side note, I am in charge of IT purchasing and I was very happy with Dell up until that point. My company buys 8-12 servers a

Re:Consistency

[blhack (921171)]

In addition to a non-vista option, they need to offer MS office 2003. A few months ago I logged into dell's website to order a batch of computers and noticed that the option for 2003 had was gone, and they were only offering 2007.

This is absurd.
In my experience, there is almost no demand for 2007. What I ended up having to do was sign up for a site licensing agreement with microsoft to get my hands on 2003. In the mean time, I installed OpenOffice on the computers that I had ordered. This prompted my boss to go "Why are we spending 350 bucks a hit on something that we can get for free?".

So now we use OO exclusively.

THANKS DELL/MICROSOFT!

Re:

[solarce (450240)]

What you need to do is contact your Dell Small Business account rep (I'm assuming you have one) and talk to him about Open Business Licensing. All you need to do is purchase 5 MS licenses in one chunk (it can be Office, Project, Visio, XP, Vista, 2003, SQL Server, whatever, but it must be 5 licenses in one order) and you can get Open Business licenses.

What happens after that is that you are given an authorization number and an agreement number (for each license or block of like licenses, say you purchase 3

Re:

[marcello_dl (667940)]

What you need to do is contact your Dell Small Business account rep (I'm assuming you have one) and talk to him about Open Business Licensing. All you need to do is purchase 5 MS licenses in one chunk (it can be Office, Project, Visio, XP, Vista, 2003, SQL Server, whatever, but it must be 5 licenses in one order) and you can get Open Business licenses.

What happens after that is that you are given an authorization number and an agreement number (for each license or block of like licenses, say you purchase 3

Re:

[Ephemeriis (315124)]

I would buy 10 identical computers, open them up and find a zillion different parts from a zillion manufacturers in them. This drives me crazy. I heard tell that Dell was addressing this, but haven't followed up. I switched to Acer a few years back. If Dell wants to sell me computers again they need A. a guarantee that the sub-contracted bits inside are of a consistent quality, and B. a non-Vista option.

It depends on what model line you're buying. The business-grade stuff like the Optiplexes are very consi

Meh.

[SatanicPuppy (611928)]

Mediocre quality, slow delivery, piss poor service and support...What's not to like?

If you buy a lot of computers and deal with multiple retailers, the contrast can't help but leap out at you. HP, from being craptacular last decade, has done a much better job of "reinventing" themselves than Dell has. Middleman retailers like CDW are fricking lightning fast, and they're really easy to deal with, especially when buying volume.

Contrast this with Dell...I work for a national corporation that does millions of dollars a year in business with Dell...Or used to. We had representatives in corporate who were in direct contact with high-powered Dell salespeople. Did it expedite anything? No. We have top tier support, does it stop them from sending out techs who know less than non-experts on our local staff? I had to help some dumbass fix a printer once, and my printer repair technique is normally limited to bft [google.com].

I was a big Dell fan...once. I've yet to see any sign that they've done anything but continue their slide toward the low end of the market.

Re:

[masdog (794316)]

On the flip side of things, the division of a national corporation that i work for is almost exclusively Dell, and our account reps are trying to get the entire company. We get our orders very quickly with huge discounts. The plants I oversee are sort of the odd ones out because I still buy Lenovo Thinkpads over the Dell Latitudes.

Re:Meh.

[blhack (921171)]

HP, from being craptacular last decade, has done a much better job of "reinventing" themselves than Dell has.

Amen to this.

HP/Compaq have moved their level 2 tech support to British Columbia. I have had 2 laptops in the last two years that have needed replacements and have actually had their tech support staff CALL ME BACK a few days after the warranty claim to check in with me.

That absolutely blew me away. IT wasn't an automated email, or phone message or anything. it was:
"Ryan?...he this is Heather from HP....I talked to you earlier this week?"
"oh hey!"
"Yeah, i just wanted to make sure that you got the box to put your computer in and that everything was okay!"

awesome :)
and no, i don't work for HP....
Everybody needs to model their tech support after THAT!

Re:

[ISoldat53 (977164)]

Interestingly, that used to be the Dell model.

Re:Meh.

[g2devi (898503)]

I've just bought a pair of Dell Laptops and these seem to be fairly good quality and everything works flawlessly with Ubuntu (if you apt-get the backports).

As far as Linux goes, I'd recommend them. The main issue I see with Dell's isn't the the features, it's the anti-features like Media-Direct.

For those that don't know why this is an anti-feature, a brief explanation, if you press the Media Direct button when the laptop is *off*, it normally runs the Media player for Dell in the Media Direct partition. Sounds good, except if you reformat your drive to reclaim the 40-60GB Vista-mirror+Media-Direct+Dell Utility partitions and put Ubuntu or anything else there. If you do that, Media Direct dumbly messes up your partition table and randomly writes over your disk. Essentially, Media Direct is should be called Media Destruct if you don't follow the Gospel according to Dell. This wouldn't be so bad, except that there isn't even a BIOS feature to turn it off. The only "solutions" I've seen is to write 0s on the entire hard disk (so that the media direct button can't do anything other than display a splash screen) or manually disable the button by opening the case.

I'm not sure if other vendors have similar anti-features, but it is a big reason I won't even consider doing a BIOS upgrade for my Laptop or keep the Utility partition. The last thing I need is one of these anti-features reverting my machine back to "the button of death" configuration.

Re:Meh.

[SatanicPuppy (611928)]

If all I cared about was price, I'd buy from HP. And we have a big honkin corporate contract with CDW, so the prices are actually pretty nice.

We still buy some Dell stuff...Just bought a pair of Poweredge 2950's I'm pretty pleased with, though god help us if we ever need support.

By and large though, I'd rather buy a more expensive machine with better service and support than a cheaper machine with crappy service and support. We got a shipment of optiplexes not that long ago with a batch of bad capacitors on their motherboards, and for the amount of time we wasted on the phone with dell support getting them to send replacement parts for a fricking known problem...They should have looked at the service tag said, "Is it not booting?" and sent us a new motherboard with no further questions....Not made us jump through the goddamn hoops every single time. We got a guy who's Dell certified on staff, which usually means they'll take your word for it, but noooooo.

I'm just sick of 'em. It's beyond the pale. We bought 70 new pcs this year at my location, and I think 5 were Dell, and the rest were Macs and HPs.

Re:

[daenris (892027)]

Odd. I've had the opposite experience with them. I was heartily anti-Dell because of personal experiences with them and their support. However, once I started working for a large institution that used them as the primary computer supplier, I found myself pleasantly surprised. Every time we had to contact them about problems it was a quick response and extremely quick shipping/service on needed replacement parts. We actually had a bunch of Optiplexes go bad. I opened them up and saw that there were bad

Re:Meh.

[rmm4pi8 (680224)]

Interestingly enough, while I have concerns about Dell's build quality (had server issues that were 'known upfront' like the Optiplex capacitor issue you mention), in my experience they're waay cheaper than HP (>30% on the 4 and 8 core servers we typically buy) and I've been really impressed by their speed of support and delivery.

No, the delivery speed is nothing like CDW, but you're paying (literally) 50% of what the comparable HP from CDW would be (the 30% figure above is based on quotes from HP direct), and the delivery speed is much faster than what we get from Lenovo Direct on laptops, for instance. On support, I've found that they have competent Linux admins, are aggressive about sending out replacement parts, and even though they only officially support Red Hat and SuSE are in fact completely ok with doing troubleshooting on CentOS and Mandriva systems. Also, when I have had problems the "email my manager at" links that go out on the bottom of every email from a Dell employee are monitored religiously. I've had to complain twice to a manager about something, and both times I got both problem remediation and a nice discount for my time and trouble.

This is on about $50,000 a year volume, so I can't speak to what a smaller business might experience, though obviously we're no Fortune500. Also, and this is I think the real Dell advantage, they actually sell totally configurable systems--you might get the impression from their websites that HP and Lenovo do this, but my experience has been that they will only offer decent discounts and lead times (both pretty expected in a corporate situation) if you're buying a stock or mostly stock SKU.

Re:

[ryanov (193048)]

What's interesting is that I have about 75 GX270's and I don't know about more than a couple that have had motherboards fail. I have had trouble with the USB ports on mine twice now, though... is that the problem we're talking about, or are we talking no-boot?

Contrast that with the M782 monitors, though, where we had damn near every single one we ordered fail. The "new" ones that come back are clearly not new, either, as they arrive with inconsistent displays (bad convergence on only one side, etc).

Re:

[GaryOlson (737642)]

We are talking no power to even get to a BIOS screen. Depending on your purchase cycle depends on what GX270 you received -- bad capacitors or not. I purchased GX270s in small batches over the life of the model; I had a 50/50 failure rate on the motherboard capacitors. (which usually took out the P/S also)

M782 monitors? OH THE HORRORS! The 17" LCDs are really affordable now. Best just to forget about those monitors; they had bad juju beans.

Re:

[Ephemeriis (315124)]

and for the amount of time we wasted on the phone with dell support getting them to send replacement parts for a fricking known problem...They should have looked at the service tag said, "Is it not booting?" and sent us a new motherboard with no further questions....Not made us jump through the goddamn hoops every single time. We got a guy who's Dell certified on staff, which usually means they'll take your word for it, but noooooo.

Dell's technical support is infuriatingly inconsistent... Doesn't seem to m

Re:

[QuantumRiff (120817)]

The 270's were horrible for the capacitors on the motherboards. They even extended the warranty for the mobo only for another year. We lost something like 20% of ours. I've also had several power supplies fail in the GX620 lines. Not nearly as bad as the 270's problems, but still about 3 times our normal average.

Re:

[CastrTroy (595695)]

Or maybe you get what you pay for. I'm not going to comment on the quality of either of their offerings since I've only bought 2 computers in my life, and neither from these companies. However, if one company gives you a consistent quality product, an the other does not, then maybe the 25% markup is worth it. It really depends on how important the computers are to your business.

Re:

[SatanicPuppy (611928)]

The markup isn't anywhere near that high. We bought 20 Mac mini's from them for about 30 bucks a pop more than it would have cost us to buy 'em from Apple...That's not even 10%.

Re:

[blindd0t (855876)]

What we've found at the company I work for (which is a small business) is that Dell's price is right if you're willing to wait a little more. So Dell is attractive for our small number of workstations and other small office equipment (computers, monitors, etc...), as we can use backups and spares to get by if the wait is a long one. However, when you have mission critical equipment that must be up 24/7, our experience is that it pays to go through CDW to ensure any replacement items/units are shipped very

Re:

[masdog (794316)]

Price-wise, CDW might not be the best deal for some items if you're not under a JBA or corporate contract. But if you are, or you absolutely must have it tomorrow (or today in the Chicagoland-area), then you really can't beat them.

Single-page (printing) URL

[Lord of Hyphens (975895)]

The whole article on one page. [computerworld.com]

I've always heard Dell suck, but now I know why

[Joebert (946227)]

I've heard about how much Dell sucks for years, rarely have I ever heard anything good about them. I think I've met two people who were happy with their Dell experience.


Ironicly enough, I was just on my way here to submit a story about a guy who can't even use his own Dell credit line [grinchynet.net], even though he's already purchased laptops for his kids Christmas presents. Then I saw this story, sad.

Re:

[Grinch2171 (1052392)]

We use Dell servers and workstation here at work exclusively and never had an issue with them. We have their Gold support and if something goes wrong, within 4 hours a replacement is here. Tech support for the servers has been top notch. But when it comes to home products they are seriously flawed as my little blog post states. How a company can ship over two thousand dollars worth of hardware to me but won't send me a 200 dollar camcorder because they can't verify who I am is beyond comprehension.

I don't get it

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

"it's not good enough just to boot"

What do you expect from a commodity server manufacturer? If you want premium (server) hand-holding, buy from a premium (server) manufacturer (HP, IBM, etc.). I have to say, my expectations of OS support from the likes of Dell or MicroCenter or CDW are exactly ZERO. I shop with those guys when I care about price, and maybe a decent hardware warranty.

Re:I don't get it

[jswinth (528529)]

Expectations have definately gotten out of hand. For years people made the argument that Dell should offer Linux pre-installed. Dell didn't want to do it because of the support problems. To which the typical Slashdotter replied, "don't worry, we just want to escape the MS tax and will likely re-install from scratch again anyway." Now that Dell actually does provide Linux installed on more and more machines they are taken to task because of support issues. This isn't going to make other manufacturers want to follow Dell's lead. It is kind of like when your child says, "if you get me the puppy then I will feed and pickup after him, pleeeaaase!" Maybe the "Linux Community" needs to pickup after themselves and stop complaining.

Re:

[farkus888 (1103903)]

those with the initiative to pick up after the puppy, to follow your analogy, probably were willing to work to pay for the puppy. [stretching here] that is to say they probably built a custom server. I know that is a big task for a fortune 500 type enterprise server, but most of dells server market is smaller servers than that from what I have seen. if they really wanted to just duck the "ms tax" they would have been asking for clean HDs out of the box. less work for dell and gives them a clean slate to ins

Re:

[Kjella (173770)]

it seems pretty clear the "please preinstall linux" crowd was planning to snowball it to "please support linux" when you look at it that way.

So you got the hardware inside the box working, now how about the hardware outside the box? I wouldn't mind if Dell became a hardliner on this, maybe even made some kind of whitelist/blacklist for compatibility so you could get properly branded "Linux-ready" hardware. Or even just let them scream at whatever third party manufacturer which made the linux-incompatible device. Of course they'd *like* to snowball it into support for everything under the sun, I just don't think Dell should let them.

I mean, do y

Re:

[jedidiah (1196)]

One has NOTHING to do with the other.

Consistency and quality and support aren't suddenly non-issues just because you are running Redmond's flavor of the month.

Here's a nickel kid get yourself a better computer

[wsanders (114993)]

It's not for lack of talent in the Dell Linux team. I've been following the Dell Linux server list for years, having been responsible for all-Dell Linux server farms in the past, and Matt Domsch and the team there has been doing great work, considering the obstacles thrown in their way by the randomness of the hardware.

This is constantly-morphing commodity hardware, with light-outs support, RAID, and other details optimized for Windows, and a new interface randomly tossed out the door in each new server mod

How about fixing the quality of the laptops.

[schwit1 (797399)]

10% of our D520s have had to have motherboards replaced because the onboard Ethernet goes tango uniform.

Nothing to see here...

[Frosty Piss (770223)]

Johnny Nobody, owner of , a small consulting firm with offices in the US and UK ... is satisfied with Dell equipment, but said the company needs to show more support for open-source applications and the Linux OS.

Dell thanks you for your input.

What is clear is that people are not happy will Dell's support for desktop deployments and smaller customers. But these are not the area that Dell is interested in. The article and many others show that Dell support for their Linux SERVER products is good. Why would a reasonable person expect Dell to support uses like Desktop and small business when that is not their Linux focus? Dell does not sell Linux for the hobby or home user, it's not realistic to expect them to support these segments of customer.

Re:

[jimicus (737525)]

HP and IBM have contributed things other than hardware support to Linux.

Big things, like LVM and JFS. Generally, these items have been ported across from some other system which offered such facilities.

Dell, OTOH, has done little beyond basic hardware support. But they don't have some huge legacy midrange Unix OS which they could port features from. It would be nice to see them add some real value rather than "added the PCI ID for our latest rebranded LSI SAS card to the kernel", but I don't think it'll

Re:

[Dan Ost (415913)]

You've got it all wrong. We don't need Dell wasting effort to create features for Linux. We're good at creating features for Linux. What we're bad at, and Dell is good at, is convincing hardware manufactures to open up so that we can properly support their hardware.

Re:

[mr_mischief (456295)]

Wait... did I miss something about the software flat out not running? Or was TFA about Dell not offering support? "Not supporting" when talking about a vendor doesn't mean it won't work, just that they won't help you with it when you need help. It's not saying that Linux on Dell machines "doesn't support" TuxRacer.

Everyone with any illusions about what Dell is please repeat after me, "Dell is a hardware vendor. Dell is not a systems integrator or a consulting firm. Dell wants to sell me a box. What I do wit

Re:

[jedidiah (1196)]

You would have the same exact problem with any Unix or any OS for
that matter. 3rd party software is supported (by well) 3rd parties.
You don't go to Dell for support of some random bit of app software
you do to whomever wrote it or whomever is providing 3rd party
support.

Does anybody see the irony in this situation?

[macurmudgeon (900466)]

We have a company that was successful when the founder was running then foundered under his replacement. Now the founder returns and is righting the ship. Who would have thought that Dell would follow Apple's business model?

It's not irony.

[SatanicPuppy (611928)]

It's just that the interim weenie was out for profit at all costs. Profit at all costs makes you a lot of money, initially, but one of the costs is your customer base.

It's going to take them a long time to win back the people who they alienated.

Dell support and Linux

[btm (160064)]

We've used Dell gear in my last couple of jobs. We had some stupid level of support on our Latitudes at my last job and they'd send people out to replace the hard drives and little rubber feet and everything, which was sort of nice but still annoying to take care of. We use a ton of Dell servers at my new job and at least on the hard drive failures I've seen so far Dell support has been really good at overnighting new drive right out. However, I've always been frustrated by the support levels in the same w

Server side linux support is a joke

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's clear that Dell cares about Linux, in that all their server-class hardware is well-supported by the Linux kernel and they have many people dedicated to making sure that's the case. However, it's not good enough just to boot,

Ding! On the server side:

• OpenManager (the all-seeing, all-encompassing web-based management tool) does not work on 64 bit OS's because it is compiled for 32 bit, and needs 32 bit libraries. The RPM dependencies are not properly set, which they claim they're "working on", but they can't even be bothered to provide a list of the packages we need to install
• Redhat AS / Centos 5.1 are not supported. Various drivers either don't load, or segfault after spewing error messages on the console.
• All the parameter conventions for their utilities are DOS-style. Example: "-?" to get help. Usage help returned by binaries sucks.
• There are no man pages....for ANYTHING.
• Basic unix filesystem conventions, much less the FHS, is/are ignored. Example: OpenManager installs loads of binaries into /etc/openmanager
• The various update utilities are compiled against older versions of libstdc++. The RPM dependencies don't account for this.
• The "driver update" DVD contains a "figure out what needs to be updated for firmware/bios", but is also compiled against a specific version of libstdc++. Installing the specific version it demands does nothing- it still refuses to work, claiming it needs the version you just installed. Did I mention that the first time you run suu, it spends several minutes copying itself into /tmp, and that the entire thing is a giant ugly clusterfuck of Java?

Don't get me started on what pieces of shit the "PERC" raid controllers (made by LSI) are...

Re:

[FreeUser (11483)]

OpenManager (the all-seeing, all-encompassing web-based management tool) does not work on 64 bit OS's because it is compiled for 32 bit, and needs 32 bit libraries. The RPM dependencies are not properly set, which they claim they're "working on", but they can't even be bothered to provide a list of the packages we need to install

Openmanager works fine on CentOS 4.x (x86_64) and Fedora7 (x86_64). We use it where I work with no problems at all.

(You are perhaps not aware that 64-bit Linux has no trouble runnin

Not sure on their linux side

[ducomputergeek (595742)]

Ironically, they are the same issues that drove me from recommending Gateway and go with Dell about a decade ago. Really this hit one of my clients about this time last year. (For the record I mostly do my Consulting business in video production arena, which is mostly dominated by Apple at the small/medium level and BOXX for those deploying none-custom Linux boxen) I was doing some work at a small medical supply company who were still running their inventory and billing software on 15 year old DOS based systems.

However, over the past few years I've been seeing an increase in the number of quality control issues on their PC boxes. Probably from cutting corners in the cost. Something similar happened to Gateway and Packard Bell back in the day. Also, the fact when people called tech support they got someone who barely spoke english and answered questions from a script further served to alienate users.

This time last year I was working on a project for a small mom & pop medical supply company. It was coming time for a new round of Medicare and state certifications, plus the owners were getting ready to sell the company and retire after running it for 25 years and their 15 year old computers running DOS wasn't going to make the cut. Especially when trying to sell the company. (Hey if you buy it, the first thing you have to do is buy $25k in hardware and software (mostly software).

Their software vendor was still in business. They recommended going with Dell (They had some sort of deal with them plus had stated they were able to get support from Dell as opposed to HP or other vendors with their product lines). However, the company was also very upfront with the fact that their software WOULD NOT work on Vista.

I kept telling the business owners they needed to purchase their workstations last January before the switchover to Vista happened. I kept telling them that as soon as Vista was released, they would not be able to get a Dell PC shipped with XP Pro. And I kept getting the: "We have 30k of public aid money coming. We'll buy them when it comes in." Now this was more of a small business owner problem than a Dell problem, but nothing happened for a couple months and I got a phone call at the end of Feb (may have been early March). "We called Dell, and they said they can't(won't) ship a PC workstation with XP pro on it. It's all vista and the software won't work on Vista and probably won't for another year or more!". I was originally hired to back up their data from the DOS box and for my advise on what to do next. (Going to a hosted solution, vs. storing the data locally, which basically meant listen to the sales folks, and then tell the owners of the business my opinion.)

I was nice and checked around and Gateway was the only somewhat major vendor, ironically, that still offered machines you could order with XP pro installed. Well, they ended up buying Dell's with Vista. and eventually spending another $500 downgrading to XP Pro. And that was after 3 months of being the software vendors Vista beta test bitch (And the software vendor still charged the medical supply company $15k with no discount for the honor)

And this wasn't the first time. I also remember this happening in the transition from Windows 2k pro to XP. A lot of my clients at the time liked Windows 2K Pro and saw no major need to upgrade right away. (And I still don't blame them.)

Re:Not sure on their linux side

[rmm4pi8 (680224)]

You know, I've seen a lot of people complaining about not being able to get XP on new machines, but while Dell's "SOHO" store seems to make that difficult/impossible, the "Small Business" store (which does not require a volume floor, dedicated rep, or anything else) has always made XP fully available. Same goes for the Lenovo website. I fully anticipate both with continue holding out as long as Microsoft lets them in response to market demand from companies like mine which just have no incentive to make the plunge (especially as because XP's been out so long, all of our machines are on it, which is nice, and in addition to the expense anyone who's ever tried to upgrade Windows on 100 laptops knows that's pretty much a non-starter). Also, Dell only offers the better-quality Latitude notebooks through the small business store. Why does anyone even bother with the SOHO store? Is their marketing just that good?

Poor service, bad field engineers, poor quality

[olivercromwell (654085)]

I work for a large maker of an enterprise wide healthcare application. We sell a complete turnkey system including the hardware (servers and workstations). We used to sell Dell pro-actively as an alternative to Copmpaq/HP. We no longer do so, as we would continually run into problems with poor support, and horrible field engineers (contracted out to Unisys). In one instance, a customer lost a terabyte of data that needed to then be retrieved from tape (the filed engineer started swapping disks between cages in a RAID 0+1 enclosure). After several years of grief, we dropped Dell. If a customer insists on Dell, which som do, we no longer act on their behalf for hardware issues, as we would for an HP shop. Their support contracts cover our software only, and they are on their own as regards hardware support (including negotiating the support agreement itself). As far as I am concerned, Dell sucks, and it will take a WHOLE lot to convince me otherwise.

Interivewed because of Dell IdeaStorm post

[jeremycole (1076439)]

Since I got interviewed for the article and then quoted in the Slashdot summary, I thought I'd pipe in... I was interviewed by Agam because of my post to Dell's IdeaStorm site about the PERC 5/i RAID controller:

Leverate LSI to Open Source MegaCli [ideastorm.com] — Dell is using LSI's chipset (LSI MegaRAID SAS) in the PERC 5/i controller, but the tools to manage it are closed source and really suck. Vote on it NOW! :)

Dell complaining about low uptake of Linux PCs

[OwlWhacker (758974)]

Dell recently moaned about the low uptake on its Linux PCs. I'm not surprised, considering what they were offering.

I have bought several machines from Dell over the past few years, the latest being an Inspiron 550, and have installed Linux on all of them.

Fedora 8 runs beautifully on the Inspiron 550, which is a very inexpensive machine, for which there is no option to buy with Linux installed.

So, really, Dell shouldn't complain about the low uptake on its Linux PCs but should offer more diversity of machines that come with Linux!

Poor prices from Dell, sorta

[Kickstart70 (531316)]

We buy a ton of computers from Dell and HP and the one thing that really bugs me about Dell is that they give price breaks on the same models to consumers first, and then we 'premium' buyers basically have to beg them to match that price. Same models, crappier prices for their business customers. I just don't understand....do they think we can't see their banner ads all over the internet?