Don't Ever Buy A Dell

Put the kids to bed early, joe's going on a rant (actually I kept it clean, because who knows who's kids might be reading!?!?!?)

I don't like to use this blog to rant about my beliefs. Yes I lean certain directions politically, but this is not the place to shout my ideas. This is about my adventure in Japan, but this time I have something so obnoxious that I can't help but share my experience.

Don't Ever Buy A Dell. First off, I got horrible customer support after they delayed my delivery no less than 4 times. The first time they told me it would be one week. Then it was another week. Then I just didn't care. I was already in Japan, without my computer toating around a "crappy" Acer computer. I hoped I would be rid of in a few short weeks and on my new, shiny, state-of-the-art (for laptops right at $1k anyways) dell. It was going to be blue, a favorite color of mine, so as to make me feel more attached to it. Like all things you become attached to, they are bound to cause pain a few times.

When it FINALLY got to japan almost 8 weeks after its supposed original arrival date (my dad did have it for 2 weeks installing a new OS and powerful CAD softwares) it started up beautifully. I uninstalled some of the junk still left by dell, and installed some of my own personal use softwares. Restarted. Wireless died. Wouldn't connect to my painfully paid for wifi. Even if it did, there was never an internet connection. And even if there was an internet connection, I couldn't actually use the internet. I did what people in my knowledge and situation do, find a driver(after 8 hours of doing everything else possible). I thought MAYBE dell's horrible software would help me do it just a tad faster than what google was capable of. Of course I was gravely mistaken. Dell gave me the driver options for all of the other wireless cards my computer could've come with, but not the one it did come with. I found it on my own, courtesy of google and intel. Everything went back to semi normal. Sometimes (such as today) it won't find my wireless network, I had to restart. It still won't connect to the internet on its own. It thinks my wifi is a "public" network and won't connect until I change it to "private."

Last week I did an update for windows. Killed my computer, almost. 95% memory usage? Check. No windows applications run, which could help me figure out what's wrong? Check. It turns out it was mostly because of Onecare, which seems to have had a problem updating or something in that line, because it broke. I never did get it to work right again, so I just uninstalled it, which was in itself a chore. Part of the problem was the fact that the McAfee software that I had uninstalled which dell had included on my computer because I was not given a choice to leave it off, had left behind some fun little friends. They were constanly trying to start up without their mother programs. That in combination with Onecare catastrophically failing nearly killed my computer.

Today my disc drive up and disappeared on me. It was there one minute, and I watched it disappear the next(that reminds me, my keyboard breaks from time to time, this week it's the "X" button).

---3 hours later

I had to stop in the middle of ranting to pick up andrea from school. Instead of finishing I set my mind to work on my computer, which I easily fixed. Still annoying. I suppose I am calmer now, but I'm still going to post this, for the simple fact that if someone out there is on the edge of deciding whether or not they're "getting a dell," that they'll change their mind. Maybe dell will read this and offer to fix my computer or give me some sizable discount. I doubt it, they don't seem to care about their customers much anymore. Worth a shot though.

(If anyone had listened closely, while our friend Lyndsi was in town, who owns a mac, I actually yelled at my computer that I was going to go to kojima and buy one. It was an empty threat, but if the rest of this year goes as well as the last 4 months, who knows?)