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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Dude, I'm returning my Dell

I received my dell home desktop yesterday. I was pretty excited about it, but that excitement quickly went away. Here are my issues:

  1. The Power Supply is only 150W. What the heck? This isn’t a TiVO! It’s a PC with 2 PCI slots, an additional hard drive + 5.25 inch drive bay. I tried to add my PCI-PATA RAID card from my old PC and my two 200GB PATA drives and the machine would not power on. I use RAID-1 and refuse to use a PC w/o RAID any more.
  2. The Graphics card is freaking loud as heck. It’s the single loudest thing in my room.

Dell has a 21 day return policy from the day of invoice! OMG, that was 13 days ago and I just got my PC unpackaged. What kind of company starts the clock when you place the order (and penalizes you for build time, and UPS Ground Shipping across the country)?

Anyhoo, it was a nice lesson. I’m now going to get a Shuttle ST20G5 with an AMD 64 from Newegg and call it a year. I can get the case, proc and memory for $650. I can then transfer the goods from my old PC to the new one. I should have done that in the first place, but the $700 off coupon was so tempting.

 

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 12:14:06 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Going X2 on the Athlon64? Which model are you toying with?
Wednesday, August 03, 2005 6:08:19 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
This Shuttle looks pretty good! I guess by the time you tranfer the goods to this one, it'll be one hell of a computer! I saw another one on their website 'XPC SB83G5M', MCE ready apparently. That looks good too!
Are you a gamer by the way? Noticed you'd ordered 256MB graphics card. ;)
Wednesday, August 03, 2005 12:43:14 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
D'oh! I hearby transfer the bad luck pc wand to you. Enjoy.

Thursday, August 04, 2005 11:34:28 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
150w PSU for a 3.4 P4 CPU? Wow, that's cutting it close, even for Dell:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000353.html

Definitely go Athlon X2. There is absolutely no reason for a developer to own a P4.
Thursday, August 04, 2005 1:38:22 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
X2 is a bit pricey for me right now...
Friday, August 05, 2005 6:48:34 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
$500 is pricey for a tool essential to your livelihood?

So I take it MS doesn't pay their developers very well? :P

Maybe this will help, too:

http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q3/athlon64-x2-3800/index.x?pg=1
Saturday, August 06, 2005 12:23:00 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Well for one thing I don't get paid to write code :-). I only do that in my free time. Right now I'm doing it on a computer that's waaaay slower!
Sunday, August 07, 2005 11:15:52 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
> Well for one thing I don't get paid to write code

True

> I only do that in my free time

All the more reason to Make Mistakes As Fast As Possible. (tm)

At the risk of sounding didactic-- aw, who am I kidding-- $500 is a no-brainer for that kind of performance increase.

I can't speak for you, but my brain certainly isn't getting any faster. I'll take all the help I can get.
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