We all got pretty excited when Dell appeared to be asking what customers really wanted. We should have known better. Manufacturers of cookie-cutter computers have no vested interest in customers that expect their needs to be met. They need customers that settle for what they’re fed and are content to overpay for the privilege.

We can only get some satisfaction from knowing Dell opened a seething can of worms. The lid will never fit quite so tightly again;-D

I agree Dell has fallen behind in their business responsiveness and support to the customer, both things which the business was originally built on. You can see the impact in the stock market of this as well. A few years ago Dell was the #1 most desirable company to own, as of this year it is no longer in the top 20. Dell needs to get their act together.

For years, I was a huge supporter of Dell. As the IT manager for a mid-size company, I bought only Dell products, and I ALWAYS recommended Dell to any company employees who wanted to purchase a computer for themselves. I have 8 Dell servers, 5 of which have run 24/7 for 6 years with nary a hitch. But over the course of the last year, I have noticed a diturbing trend toward mediocrity from Dell. New machines come in and they just don’t work (Dell seems to have huge problems with imbedded NIC cards over the last 6 months). Support for everything except servers has been moved overseas, so the best you can get is a person who you can hardly understand, reading directly off of a script, asking me to walk through all 10 troubleshooting steps that I’ve already tried. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, I can pretty much narrow down a hardware problem by myself, and to have to do it twice in order to get a replacement part sent out is frustrating. The final straw is the Windows Vista thing. I’m not ready to start putting it out there yet, until I’ve tested it against all of our in-house stuff, but Dell won’t sell me an XP Pro box. In fact, I was told by one of their sales reps that if I wanted XP Pro, I should take a Vista box, reformat it and install XP. Incredible. Not only do I not have the time to do that, I suspect Microsoft might have a problem with that course of action from a licensing standpoint. I have to get 15 new PCs in here over the next month, and for the first time in a very long time, they will not be Dells.

Dell in particular, but others as well. I really don’t like being fed this latest version of Windows with its big muscular brother hidden agenda programs in any machine but at least I can get them to include the other versions. I would like to purchase a Dell notebook but refuse to do so as no other options are offered. Come on Dell, wise up or get out of it…

You guys are pretty ignorant with the facts. Optiplex’s are offered with Vista and XP. Also if you can read you will see that Tech Support for them is North America based. If you are buying Dimensions for your business than you are not all that smart. Also whats with all the fear of Vista. It works fine. We are running some old DOS apps on Vista. You guys are paid to figure out solutions to problems, so get off it and figure out how to use Vista.