Featured

Over the past week or so, there has been a major story break­ing in the tech world that between 2003 and 2008, Dell sold mil­lions and mil­lions of desk­top PCs that they knew had bad moth­er­boards. And Dell has had mil­lions of prob­lems because of that– com­pa­nies found hun­dreds or thou­sands of com­put­ers would unex­pect­edly quit work­ing and need seri­ous repairs, and as often is the case with com­puter prod­ucts, lots of them break after any war­ranty has expired.

It’s sad, it really is.  The last Dell I pur­chased was in 2003, an Insp­iron note­book that still “runs”.  I also had my dad pur­chase a Dimen­sion desk­top dur­ing that time.

Dell was once the com­pany to beat.  They were “it” when it came to price and reli­a­bil­ity, but obvi­ously some­where along the way they lost focus.  Why would they allow faulty prod­ucts to be sent out for years?  Wouldn’t the repair costs to them be extra­or­di­nary?  Appar­ently not, which just tells you how much it doesn’t cost them to make these com­put­ers.  Parts that would cost us hun­dreds of dol­lars to replace our­selves they can replace for a few dollars.

I will not be buy­ing any Dell prod­ucts for the time being — although I have been avoid­ing them for years now.  Ever since a friend who got the same lap­top as me in 2003 had to replace the moth­er­board because of a bad power Jack design.… Inter­est­ing how these things man­i­fest them­selves. Sin finds us out — even­tu­ally the truth always prevails.

Hi, I’m a Mac!  Well, actu­ally, I’m prob­a­bly more like a PC (Win­dows, actu­ally, since PC can tech­ni­cally refer to Mac, Win­dows, Ubuntu, or any other fla­vor of  “Per­sonal Com­puter”).  I have sev­eral com­put­ers, prob­a­bly too many to be spe­cific, but the fact is, I have an obses­sion.  And it’s called wish­ing I owned Macs!  It’s not that they are shiny and look cool (although they most cer­tainly do), but that the over­all lay­out and feel of the OS fos­ters cre­ativ­ity and just feels so much smoother and clean.  And for some­one like me, that’s a very impor­tant thing!

The prob­lem is, because I have sev­eral other very nice, fairly new, com­put­ers at my dis­posal, it would be nearly impos­si­ble to jus­tify spend­ing the many thou­sands of dol­lars it would cost to switch to Mac, not to men­tion the required soft­ware.  Since I’m run­ning soft­ware like Pho­to­shop and Sony Vegas, which on their own cost as much as some com­put­ers, it would be a HUGE invest­ment (err, actu­ally not an invest­ment because com­put­ers decline in value) expense for the rel­a­tively small ben­e­fit — being as how I can do pretty much any­thing on my PCs that I could on Macs.

So for now, I’m a PC.  Although, there’s no say­ing what will hap­pen sev­eral years down the road when these PCs need to be replaced!