The Geek Files: Why I Hate Dell

Now first, let me preface this for all you Mac users:

You are either a PC or a Mac person, I feel. I’m a PC person. Maybe I’ll change. But I went to school for PC Tech stuff, both my partner and I did. We can build them. configure them, tweak them, repair them. Except for laptops. There is more software for PC’s. The games we (mostly he, now) plays come out for PC first, Mac is months later.

So shaddup if your only comment here is to say “Mac rulez PC droolz”.

(wait a minute….isn’t this a sex blog? *looks around* yup. sex blog. why the fuck is she babbling about geek shit?) You only have to deal with the once in a blue moon. Let me say my piece.

I brought home a coworker’s Dell tower a month or so ago to fix for her. I thought it would be a relatively simple software fix. It wasn’t booting up, you see. Shut down one day whilst the teenage boy was playing his MMO and just refused to wake. So I took out the harddrive, hooked it up to my box, and checked it out. I love telling people “um, you know you didn’t have antivirus, right?”  They argue. They could swear they did. When oh yes, they DID, but they were using Norton or McAfee, whatever came with, and has since run out of the subscription. So, the day is spent doing virus scans, because whether or not the harddrive needs wiped, I need to save their precious files. Sweet jeebus on a stick those kids downloaded an assload of stuff.

When my child is of downloading age (my future child, presuming we’re still downloading pirated crap 20 years in the future, prolly not as there will be Jetsons-type stuff by then dontcha know), I will sit him/her down and show them the proper safe way to download. The trusted link site and P2P software (i.e. NOT LimeFuckingWire).

But I digress. A good ole search online revealed others having the problem. Dell themselves confirmed that the motherboard’s realtime clock was toast. Replace the board.

Here’s Reason One why I hate Dells, and really mostly all brandname computers: You’ve got just ONE option for replacing this board. It’s all proprietary.

So we looked for a replacement board cause, oh yeah, sorry but Dell’s warranty is only 90 days. 90 fucking days?!? Whatevs.

When he cracked open her case, it looked as if they’d never opened it to clean it. There was enough globs of dust to build a complete frankenbunny, the size of a giant lop. I took pics then, but don’t know what I did with them. She claimed to me that they did, in fact, open it up and clean it every 4 months. Ok, whatever.

We finally got the replacement motherboard, and he opened it up again to to the swap. Bitch of a thing, as the fan was -monsterous-. Only a certain range of processors ran hot enough to warrant such an unwiedly beast, and she got that sort of processor. The case design is STUPID. So when the fan was taken apart to get the board out and in, we found yet MORE dust. A veritable carpet of dust. Here, see for yourself.

The average computer user could not possibly clean this. They should never ever open things up this much. So basically, it’s a ticking time bomb of doom, just waiting for imminent fry-death, being choked by dust. Why does this happen? 1, they used a goddamn processor that required a behemoth of a fan. Stupid. 2, behind that fan, as you’ll see, is a big huge open meshy area. Just SUCKING in all of the dirt. I’m amazed she ever had to dust her goddamn apartment, that’s how much was in the case.

Stupid fucking piece of shit. But we can’t build computers for people. They won’t pay the money. They can get a prebuilt one, and because they only surf the web, chat, email, and create documents, they won’t care. We can’t buy parts at a good enough discount, for one. For two, he’s picky. There are brands that deserve the money spent, like Asus boards. Lian Li cases. Zalman copper heatsinks. But alas….

Installed the new board. Boots up like a champ. Now I have to copy back all their files. And lecture the teenagers on safe downloading practices. I feel like I should take along pamphlets and the computer equivalent of condoms, or something.

and here you thought I was just a sex addict……