The article as posted on Slashdot HERE by dapsychous

It appears that certain 17" Dell laptops are supplying AC voltage to the chassis screws. Between 19 and 139 volts. This anomaly has resulted in everything from damaged components in the unit to an actual electric shock the the user.

This problem was also covered on notebookforums.com

Lack or tool bar control;
2 things here, The address bar is at the top and there's no way to change it. Drives me nuts up there. The second is a much bigger problem. There's a new 'command bar' at the bottom of the pile which also can not be moved or removed. I hate it, it takes up to much screen real estate and is mostly useless.

Breaks several important programs;
I have confirmed that IE 7 is NOT compatible with any version of Intuit Quick Books older than and including 2005. Microsoft, this is not considered a good thing. What's the deal here.

A little less important but serious none the less is that IE 7 totally breaks Apple iTunes beyond repair. I was forced to remove and reinstall iTunes from scratch.

Randomly clears cookies
Upon a system reboot I'm finding that all my saved login information disappears, but not every time. It's totally random. Recently typed form info is also erased, again, not every reboot.

The Image Tool Bar
Apparently enough people said that they didn't use this feature, so rather than turning it off Microsoft decided to eliminate it totally. So those of us who used it every day, can't. One of the most useful features in IE and they remove it.

Good going, that's a big step forward. I think you should remove spell check from Word because I can spell quite well and I don't use it. That's not really true but you get the point.

So here it is
IE7
Lacks the ability to totally customize tool bars
Breaks Intuit Quick Books 2006 and older
Breaks Apple iTunes beyond repair
Randomly clears cookies on rebooting
Lacks the images toolbar so many of us have come to love

The only thing good i will say is that the upgrade itself went very smoothly. Other than that I think I'm removing IE 7 totally

As of Dec 4th I would like to add that the installation of IE7 also seems to have broken the Apple Quicktime plug in and player. I have reinstalled both twice but they keep breaking. After a day or two of being installed, if I visit a page with a Quicktime movie on it my browser crashes and closes.

An update on this story can be found here at Forbes
"Now the company is to recall 4.1 million of its notebook computer batteries because of a fire risk." 4.1 million? What were the engineers doing that day?

"Dell will now be operating the biggest recall of electrical products in its history." Amazing that people still buy these things. There are other computer companies you know. How about IBM or Acer? Both of which have been making great computer hardware for longer than Dell has been in business.

"That makes 33 different models of notebook computers that Dell cannot guarantee will not burst into flames." Classic. 33 different versions of a flaming Laptop. Who else offers you a choice like that. I wonder if they come with fries.

Keep in mind that there award winning service team also had a recall on some 22,000 AC adapters. This problem was considered a sever fire hazard but our friends at Dell managed to get consumers the information and return packaging a short 4 months after the recall was released. 4 months they let consumers use known hazardous power adapters. What award can we give them for that?

The magazine should prove to provide news, information and events regarding Cadillac owners, enthusiasts and manufacturers. Comments are welcome

Enjoy!

Dell spanked over unacceptable Ts & Cs
Agrees to change its ways
By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View
Published Saturday 8th July 2006 19:32 GMT

Dell has agreed to give into the demands of the UK’s Office of Fair Trading and alter the terms and conditions attached to its gear.

The OFT has spent the past few months sparring with Dell over the company’s terms and conditions. The two organizations recently agreed to settle their issues with Dell changing contracts and making them “fairer to consumers,” the OFT said. The specific changes, however, remain secret as neither the OFT nor Dell will reveal exact terms and conditions alterations and as Dell has kept old contracts online.

While vague, the OFT did provide some color on the changes it was seeking.

The on-line retailer of computers, software and IT services cooperated with the OFT and has agreed to improve the transparency of its agreements with consumers and to take steps to address the OFT’s concerns, including separating terms applicable to consumers from terms relevant to business customers only and changing terms that potentially:
· limited liability for negligence to the price of the product
· excluded liability for consequential loss arising out of breach of contract
· excluded liability for oral representations not confirmed in writing, and
· required the consumer to notify Dell of any errors in its confirmation of the consumer’s order immediately.

Some of the changes come after Dell received a flood of complaints, according to consumer magazine Computing Which?.
“There are a variety of ways that technology retailers are able to sidestep their responsibility to consumers,” said the magazine’s editor Jessica Ross. “Of the complaints received about technology retailers Dell came up as the worst offender, so we appreciate any work with the OFT to improve the consumers’ position.”

Most of the complaints revolve around computer makers denying their responsibility when hardware breaks. In addition, the OFT suggested that Dell used its position as an online and mail order seller to avoid fixing problems as it should.

After receiving much abuse in the press, Dell has vowed to improve its customer service. Huge questions, of course, remain as to whether or not Dell will follow through on its promises. ®

The facts are as follows;
Fist off we can appear totally invisible or undetected to these devices. I found that if I have the web browser open on my Nextel phone, I and anyone else can walk through these device undetected. This seems to work as long as I'm within 30' or so of the device.

Secondly it is know that every time my phone transmit data by following a link in the browser the motion detector will be set off or ding. so this gives me the ability to activate the detector any time I want to and appear invisible anytime I want to.

I wrote to the corporate headquarter to both alert them of the issue and to gather information on the make an model of the devices in use. After receiving no reply I called the security office. They immediately acknowledged knowing who I was and then refused to provide any information.

So what is one to do but to gather the information themselves. I visited the store and removed the motion sensor from the wall as to get a good view of it. It seems that they have removed any indication of the manufacturer from the device, so it is still unknown as to what type of motion detector we're talking about or who makes it.

More to come on the specifics I hope.

Before I start I’d like to state my personal belief. If an everyday user decides one day that he or she needs wireless networking, goes and buys an access point without doing any research, hooks it up out of the box, I feel it’s the users problem if unauthorized connections are made to that AP. To properly set up a wireless network, call on a profesional, It will pay off in the end.

Prior to purchasing wireless gear you would expect that a person would ask at least one other person what they’re up against, which is really the reason for this blog. I will be going form store-to-store posing as an average user asking questions regarding the risks of wireless networking.

I’m certainly not saying that we can expect an everyday user to become a network administrator, however we can expect them to use common sense. As you know it doesn’t take much to at lease label an access point ‘private’ or ‘keep out’. If the user is not willing to take even the smallest step in keeping out the innocent wireless mobile user then it should be assumed that the AP in question is public.

Scenario 1.
I stop at a restaurant or diner with my laptop and start to do some work when suddenly my wireless card connects to an AP called ‘linksys’ or ‘default’. I use the connection to innocently surf the Internet, check my email and be on my way. Not knowing of course the AP belonged to the person living in the house next door and I was using their cable modem to do this.

Did I do anything illegal?

According to recent arrests I did. In fact they’re calling it theft of services. What are the problems in this picture?

First the AP owner made absolutely no effort to secure this device. Now some will argue that it’s the manufacturer job to warn people. How do you figure? There’s a manual in the box that says ‘READ ME FIRST’ did you? Obviously not. Some even argue that it’s the retailer job to warn you of the risks. No it’s the retailer’s job to sell you the product assuming you know how to use it. When I buy a car the seller doesn’t give me driving lessons. It’s assumed that I know how to drive.

I don’t see anything illegal here nor do I see a prosecution happening. What I do see is an ignorant user who was too lazy to try.

Second nothing was stolen, nothing damaged, no cost endured by the AP owner. Just a little bit of unlimited bandwidth being used, I see no case at all. Same scenario with an SSID of ‘private’ would be a different story. Still not secured in any way but the laptop owner has now been told that this device is NOT for public use. I still don’t see a prosecutable case, but hey at least there’s reason for arrest.

OK so how do we overcome this? People please at least change the SSID to something that tells the innocent that your AP is not for public use. Does this make your AP secure? Absolutely not but it does tell the innocent passer by not to connect to your network.

Scenario 2 I come home from work and sit down in my living room with the company laptop, and it connects to an open AP called ‘home’. I start poking around and am able to view some shares on my neighbor’s hard drive. I read some letters and take advantage of the situation by continuing to use his Internet connection. Am I stealing? Whose fault is it that I connected, his or mine?

In my opinion, the fact that the SSID was ‘home’ should have been enough indication that it was not public, however was using the bandwidth illegal? It is unlimited so again, nothing stolen. Now was looking at his hard drive illegal? I didn’t damage anything. I would call that invasion of privacy.

Had I not looked at his hard drive and only used the Internet connection can I be arrested? Why? I think he should be arrested for providing a safe haven for hackers and spammers. He’s responsible for his ISP account why wouldn’t he protect it? Owning wireless network gear or any network gear is the responsibility of the owner or network admin, period. Not the sales guy, the manufacturer or the innocent traveler. If my computer connects to something with a non-descriptive name, and with no effort of mine, I will assume that the connection is for public use.

Please voice your opinions on this. I will post the result of my store visits as they take place.

My exact experience with this update involved and IBM ThinkPad G41 running fully patched Windows XP Pro. After applying this update / patch networking functions were very very slow. In addition the issue that caused the research was the fact that any webpage requiring a login would fail after entering the username and password. The failure did not result in an error but rather a 'page could not be displayed' appearing to be a timeout situation.

Here is Microsoft's acknowledgment, or at least one of them.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;898060

I don't have any other specific information as to what systems are or aren't affected. I believe, however that this problem is isolated to XP systems only as I can not reproduce the problem on any Windows 2000 machine tested.

The errors include;

Microsoft Outlook 2000 SP1
Mail could not be sent Error 354 Server said Go Ahead

Microsoft Outlook 97 and Microsoft Outlook Express 6.0
Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection. Possible causes for this include server problems, network problems, or a long period of inactivity. Subject '', Account: 'mail.server.com', Server: 'mail.server.com', Protocol: SMTP, Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Error Number: 0x800CCC0F

Thunderbird 1.0
The message could not be sent because the connection to the SMTP server failed.
The server may be unavailable or may be refusing SMTP connections.

The Facts

· This occurs on Windows 2000 and Windows XP fully patched
· This can be recreated at will and has been tested on 5 different networks using 4 different upstream providers
· This does NOT occur when using Outlook 2000 which is patched up to date
· With Thunderbird, it only occurs when the sender and recipient are on the same server
· This has been tested with AUTO MTU on and off

At the time of this writing the actual cause is unknown and is under investigation.

When several family members held such positions it’s difficult to weigh the pros and cons of such employment. As I have always been against the political warfare that takes place in such agencies, I personally would never seek that type of position. However, when everyone in the family tells you how you have to have insurance and you have to have a retirement and their office is a good place to have a solid career, two things come to mind. Why do you always complain about your job and why is your pay so low?

I think one of those questions has been answered. THEY HAVE NO MONEY. Recently another family member didn’t heed my advice and took a job with a local county DA’s office. Now keep in mind she’s in school and is trying to make a few dollars. So she takes this job that’s supposed to be so great and then the fun begins. Her first paycheck involved a discussion about her pay rate. They decided to pay her $1 less per hour than originally agreed upon. In addition, the pay period here is biweekly, however in this case we had an employee that worked 7 weeks between checks. During this time, when inquiring about her pay, she was literally told that there was no money. When she complained about the time span they told her she was no longer needed.

Can someone explain to me what the world is coming to when a government job is this bad?

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.

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.

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.

The kicker of it is, when I asked what the store thought they were accomplishing by using these things, the cashier threatened to call security. They also indicated that they, as employees felt is was obnoxious but if they had to deal with it, they so did I.

Ok so let me get this straight, a customer is entering an environment where they would have an opportunity to commit a crime. The solution is to whack them in the head, let them know that someone could be paying attention, and now knows they're going in there, and they won't shoplift? I don't think so.
Everyone knows that the store can't put cameras in the dressing room, so no matter how much noise they create going in and out they still have the opportunity to shoplift. This in my opinion is NOT security but something that has now caused me to no longer shop for clothing in that store.

I would love to see the statistic that says "Irritating your customers prior to entering the fitting room will prevent them from stealing." What a laugh.
Folks, if your reading this, you already know that security should be approached with just the opposite attitude. You should be discreet and silent, gathering evidence until the breach has been made.