Leaving Dell
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Gateway was bought up by eMachines which in turn was bought up by Acer.
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Hard to believe Gateway could be bought up by eMachines. eM always seemed so little. What awful, awful companies. Why did any of them want any of the rest of them. LOL.
They were each, in turn, the Packard Bell of their time.
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I'm not sure why JB has such a hard time finding HP drivers, They are super easy for me. From the Drivers page you type the full name of the product and it takes you to a listing of the drivers.
IBM was the worse because there were often 3-5 different drivers for say video, etc all on the same model device.
As for driver packs, yes HP has them, but for anything other than the Elite series they suck because they don't update them after the initial release, perhaps one additional update.
HP does suffer from not updating drivers for older machines. What I mean is, even if there actually is a newer driver because the hardware made it into 2 or 3 model year newer models... HP doesn't update the website pointing to the newer drivers on the older machine.
A great example is the Touchpad driver. If you have 3 year old machine, at best you'll have a 1 year old driver, but more likely 2+ years old... even though that same line of devices, using fully compatible drivers with both old and new devices. If you want the newer driver, you have to guess what laptops might have a compatible driver and just try it.
This is probably something that IBM was the best at. From my past experience (more than 10 years ago) Dell's drivers were so proprietary that rarely would drives work from one device to the next, so getting new ones once the driver page stopped providing them simply meant that there were no newer ones.
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Not as of yet. I've gone 98% Optiplex for workstations (I and one other have an XPS). We also use their servers. But I have to say, we had some DRAC issues last April that caused the VM's to slow to a crawl. It was pretty bad and took them a few weeks to realize we needed a lot of firmware updates. But they were easy to get a hold of, even at 2AM.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Hard to believe Gateway could be bought up by eMachines. eM always seemed so little. What awful, awful companies. Why did any of them want any of the rest of them. LOL.
They were each, in turn, the Packard Bell of their time.
Not to go off subject, but didn't Gateway own Amiga for a while?
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@JaredBusch said:
@Dashrender said:
I've been on HP for the last 7 years
I prefer dell only because their website sucks less for finding drivers?
I agree, in Dell Webpage you can download drivers from a laptop with 10 years in second, that's impossible in Hp.
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@garak0410 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Hard to believe Gateway could be bought up by eMachines. eM always seemed so little. What awful, awful companies. Why did any of them want any of the rest of them. LOL.
They were each, in turn, the Packard Bell of their time.
Not to go off subject, but didn't Gateway own Amiga for a while?
Oh yeah, forgot about that!
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Amiga: the system us poor C64 owners always strived to get to one day.
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I've had horrible experience with HP support. I recently had 2 all-in-ones with touchscreen issues, first one took over a month and 4 or 5 tech visits, literally gutting the thing and replacing every single part, just to send me a new unit in the end, and shipping sucked as well. Second unit, the same story, multiple tech visits, all guts replaced, machine ended up in worst condition that originally. Again, they gave me new unit, again, shipping sucked. And the techs did really poor job putting these machines together, plastic covers had some latches broken off in the process.
I don't even want to go into their printers support, I'm just going to say that it sucks more.Dell on the other hand always managed to send me really good technicians, that would get the job done the same day. Occasionally, they had to come back to replace additional parts, but always got the job done.
I will also recommend ASUS. We use their all-in-ones and laptops with very few issues. We re-sell ASUS all-in-ones on some of our optical measurement machines, and customers are really happy with these. Great hardware quality, and contrary to some responses above, they do have docks. Support is really just an RMA process, and no on-site repairs, but I usually get my stuff back in less than 2 weeks. Also, all my custom build PCs here have ASUS mainboards.
By the way, NBD is really NBD if replacement parts are in stock, if not, you're sol.
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Sadly I recently had a similar support issue with HP, but then again, so have I with IBM (before the Lenovo sale) and Dell.
To me, they are all on the same footing.
I suppose we could look at the 125% over costed Fujitsu?
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Fujitsu is good stuff and they make Sparc
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I know the real gateway story because the MSP I worked for at the time was a certified repair shop. Gateway sold their business portion to a company called MPC. The whole deal was a scam. MPC bought the Gateway business division for $90 million. The deal was signed in 2007. For the first 6 months or so everything was ok. Then MPC stopped paying its repair centers and kept making excuses for delayed payments. We were always told payments were right around the corner. When they did pay, they told us we never sent back parts and tried to charge 3x the market value for the part essentially not paying us. By 2008 MPC filed for Chapter 11.
Not only was it a cluster for client support. MPC systems were complete garbage. The school district we were supporting won a several million dollar legal battle with Microsoft. Microsoft audited the school district and said we were violating terms. Long story short, we proved Microsoft wrong and won several million dollars.
With the money that was won in court, the school district bought these MPC computers through us. We were a service provider and we were making money on sales, not to mention we won the school district several million dollars. Everything was looking great.
Well, we got the computers in and an astonishing 30% were bad out of the box. Yes 3 out of 10! We ordered over a 2000 PCs. All these PCs had bad motherboards. MPC would send us the motherboards and pay us the service fee to replace them. While it looked bad to the school district, it was a good thing for us. This must have been happening everywhere because all the sudden MPC stopped paying and eventually stopped sending out parts. They were always "out of stock"
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For anyone who is interested in reading about the short life of MPC in business computing
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Dell is really pissing me off.... their support is trying to weasel out of replacing any component on a desktop machine. I've already spent 3 hours on support with them and now they want me to reinstall windows. (without any media since they didn't include it)
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@brianlittlejohn said:
Dell is really pissing me off.... their support is trying to weasel out of replacing any component on a desktop machine. I've already spent 3 hours on support with them and now they want me to reinstall windows. (without any media since they didn't include it)
Sometimes you just have to lie to get what you want. Tell them that you reinstalled it and you still have the problems.
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@marcinozga Its a brand new system. I'm just going to send it back.
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Which Dell desktops are you using, OP? I have been 99% DELL my whole career. I remember some capacitor problems on Optiplex mobos like over 10 years ago. At my current place, I have had Optiplex 380, 390, 3020 and now 7040 SFF. I have only had like 2 or 3 in 5+ years have any issue within 4 years of their in-service date.
As far as laptops go, I am still a dedicated Lenovo ThinkPad T and X series fan. Most of the problems are software related. Only occasionally do these not last a full 3 years for my remote sales personnel, who travel domestically and internationally all the time. Once they hit that mark, they are in line for an upgrade and the decent units that still have life left in them are re-purposed in-house for a variety of low-level workloads.
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We're still Dell. We've seen their customer support (specifically the dispatch tech companies they contract through) drop in quality, but their support site and part replacement process is the best in the industry, IMO. We've always had good experiences with their hardware. I was HP in my last job and we had a mix of consumer devices and servers/SANs. The MSA series SAN is crap, but the rest of their hardware is very good. Because both companies are close to equal for me, I don't know if it's worth a giant effort to migrate over to HP, but if your current experience is terrible you may have better luck over the fence.
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@TAHIN said:
and servers/SANs. The MSA series SAN is crap,
All of Dells/EQ SANs are. They are entry level SANs at best. None of them are Enterprise grade.
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@Jason said:
Anyone else contemplating leaving dell? We've seen their quality drop a lot for desktops and laptops in the past 6-12 months.
Who are you using? Reality is there is only 1 other company for us to really consider and that's HP.
We do Dell servers. Dell laptops are crap indeed. recently. But who does not do crap thee days? ;((
