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I’ve had a major frustration with Dell for a couple of years now. During that time I’ve experienced delayed shipments of parts and complete systems, non-informed customer service staff, incomprehensible automated attendants, poor support of premium tier support contract and failed hardware.

During my reign as IT manager for a local RV dealership, I was the sole responsible party for a Dell Poweredge 4400. Nice server. I was impressed with the design and redundancy.

A few months into the job SP 4 was released for Server 2000. As any good admin would do, I applied the service pack. Come to find out certain Dell servers are incompatible with the service pack rendering my server inoperable. Although Dell admitted this was a known problem, they were not willing to help nor did they publicize the issue. I had to do a full OS reinstall to recover the system.

A few months after that, I had a hard drive in the RAID 5 go bad. No big deal, it’s a RAID. So I called up Dell and tried to order a new hard drive. Hah, what a laugh that was. They didn’t want to sell me a new drive. They flat out insisted that I purchase a refurbished drive. I refused and ordered a new drive.
A day or so later I loged onto the dell website to check the status of my order to find that it’s been delayed a few days. I let a few days pass and checked again. It was delayed again. Then I’m concerned. I called Dell and asked what was going on. I expressed my concern regarding data loss and beged them to send me a drive. They inform me that the hard drive I ordered is no longer available. So I ask, “Then why is it on your web site for sale?” I got the run around and was insured that a newer larger drive will be shipped right away. Again the order was delayed. All said, I operated on a failed RAID for over a month because Dell was unable to ship a product that they were advertising for sale.

A year or so later, I’m no longer employed by the RV dealership. One of my long time customers has a Dell Poweredge 600SC, installed by someone else. The owner of this company wanted to buy his daughter a laptop for Christmas. I advise strongly against it with no avail. I order the laptop online from Dell with yet another delay. After receiving the laptop I find that it’s not configured the way I specified by through the customization questions on the Dell website, but I didn’t have time to return it and get it replaced by the holiday. The customer suffers again.

The straw that spawned this writing, and my final dealing with Dell is a recently delayed order. As my client grows the need for larger backup capacity became more apparent. I called Dell to order a replacement tape drive. This is a part advertised on the Dell website for this server, the 600SC. Two days after the order was placed I receive an email with the subject line “First Notification of Order Delay” as if they know there will be another. I called and sent an email expressing my concern. Sure enough I receive another email a couple days later telling me that the part can’t be shipped for at least another week and that they are going to automatically cancel my order unless I respond. This puts the best delivery date 3 weeks after placing the order.

After these events with a company who brags about “Award Winning Customer Service” I can only say, whoever issued the award, needs to reevaluate their standards. Dell’s customer service is absurd and totally unacceptable.

They advertise parts they don’t have. They ship systems however they want to, regardless of all the customization questions they make you answer. They have absolutely no technical answers ever, even after you pay exorbitant amounts of money for support contracts.

I don’t see how any of this is “Award Winning” and I don’t ever intend on doing business with Dell again, nor will I recommend purchasing from Dell to anyone. I’m back to the basics, buy an IBM.

Posted by Aaron at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After taking on a client, who’s web catalogue changes every 8 weeks and involves multiple copies of hundreds of images, I had to find the right tool.

The tool I chose is a product by GoldSphere called ‘Image Genius’ found at http://www.imagegenius.co.uk/Home.aspx. I used the demo product for about five minutes and purchased it. I simply cannot believe the power this product has for such a nominal price.

A small list of feature includes

· Visual easy-to-use drag and drop interface
· Single or batch image processing
· Includes powerful actions: resize, crop, border, text/image overlay and more.
· Combine actions for complex processing
· Monitor folders for automatic image processing
· Convert between image formats
· Automatically upload images after processing via FTP
· Create HTML thumbnail image galleries
· Rename image filenames in bulk

In addition to a great product, there is excellent customer support. I had an operational question shortly after my purchase, which was answered within the hour via email. Not only that but the company offered a full refund if I wasn’t satisfied.

I’m totally impressed with the value of the product and the dedication to customer satisfaction. Two thumbs up from me.

Posted by Aaron at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Too often I hear people telling me what a great deal they got on they’re new computer. You know, the $400 deal that came with a printer and a real nice flat panel monitor. Yeah ok. Let’s clarify a few things here. First of all, if there is any industry where the “You get what you pay for” adage holds true, it’s technology. A decent flat panel will cost you $300 - $400 alone. Anything less isn’t worth buying.

There’s a reason why a PC is $400, actually there are several reasons. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think everyone needs the latest and greatest but you should know what you’re getting and what to expect. Here’s a breakdown

CPU: The CPU or processor is the ‘brain’ of your computer. It handles all tasks and controls all I/O functions. A low cost computer will usually incorporate an Intel Celeron or AMD processor. Which are both less costly than a Pentium 4 or XEON. Although the frequency appears to be what you what, all CPU’s are NOT created equal. 3.0Ghz is not equal to 3.0Ghz, well sort of. Actually a cycle IS equal to a cycle but the architecture of the CPU is very different.

With the Celeron, the lack of on chip cache is probably the biggest difference and is also very important to system performance.

With the AMD processors, you will hear people talk about them benchmarking better than the Pentium 4. From what I’ve seen, that’s only true for the floating point, (math) functions. Good for gamers but doesn’t help anyone else.

If you plan on doing anything more than sending e-mail or reading a book, spend the extra money and by a genuine Pentium 4 or XEON.

Motherboard: This is surely the component, which affects system performance the most. The motherboard or mainboard is the connection of all other components to the CPU. A well-designed motherboard is worth its weight in gold. If you care about performance DO NOT buy a motherboard with on board video or sound. If the video chip or sound chip are on integrated into the motherboard that means they don’t have a unique controller chip. This is to say they are using precious clock cycles from your CPU to function. You don’t want that.

A motherboard with on-board video will perform 30% slower than the same board without. I recommend Supermicro, Intel or ASUS

RAM: Memory isn’t always about quantity. As a matter of fact, blue screens, freezes and random crashes are almost, always caused by inferior RAM. Not lack of RAM, inferior quality RAM. Don’t skimp. Buy less, higher quality RAM if you want to save a few bucks. You can always add later.

If your motherboard supports it, for a truly stable system, buy Registered ECC memory from a well-known memory source like Crucial or Kingston.

Hard Drive: Again, Quality over quantity. Hard drives come in many sizes and use many different technologies. The new buzzword is SATA or Serial ATA. SATA drives are slowly phasing out the more costly SCSI drives and slower performing IDE drives.

Many SATA drives have a spindle speed of 10,000 rpm’s as do SCSI disks. This is the speed at which the platters in the drive rotate, obviously the faster the better. A low budget PC will usually have a 5400-rpm disk. Higher quality IDE drives, although fine for most applications, still only have a spindle speed of 7200 rpm’s.

This speed also has a huge impact on overall system performance. Know what you’re buying. I recommend the SATA Western Digital Raptor 74Gb.

Video: Your choice of video cards should depend on the PC’s intended use. Just in case you missed it, do NOT get a motherboard with on-board video. You’ll regret it. Most on-board video devices also use shared memory. Which means, guess what, you can only use part of the RAM that you paid for because the video chip set needs the rest.

If you’re a gamer then you probably don’t need to read this. For gaming purposes the amount of video ram is important 128 Megs should be enough in most cases. For the serious gamer go to 256Megs. I personally like the nVidia GeForce chips.

If you’re not a gamer I still recommend 128 Megs of video RAM just in case. Although you can spend a lot of money in this department, you don’t need to. A decent, all purpose video card should cost you under $150, depending on the amount of video RAM you decide you need.

Having said all that, my claim is always that you can build a new up to date computer for under $1000 plus monitor and peripherals. Or if you don't want to build you can have a custom PC built for you, or purchase an Acer or IBM from an authorized reseller.

Posted by Aaron at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)