[ale] stupid pricing games

[scott mcbrien]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:45 PM, JK <jknapka at kneuro.net> wrote:

> Jeremy T. Bouse wrote:
>
> > Sounds as if your m-i-l got one of their XPS series systems... They are
> > big and ugly but supposedly the best Dell as as they're made for gamers
> > and such. Inspiron series are meant more for a business laptop and a
> > step up from the Latitude series. Granted mine isn't as light as my old
> > Sony Vaio PictureBook but it's not as heavy as my old Toshiba
> > SatellitePro either... I carried it back and forth every day to work
> > until boss offered me a dual-head display workstation if I left it at
> > home :)
>
>
> I thought the Latitude were the "business" grade and Inspiron were the
> "home" grade laptops?  Latitude definitely seems to be a step up in
> price, anyway.
>
> I've got a Latitude D610, supplied by my employer, that I've been using
> happily for SW development for almost four years now.  Anything that
> runs acceptably on this machine is gonna fly on real production hardware.
>
> I liked it enough that I got a second one off eBay for personal use.
> Both are still going strong, although I had to get the motherboard
> replaced on the work machine due to a failed RAM socket -- but Dell
> paid for that under the extended warranty.


My experience with Latitudes was the exact opposite, which is what cemented
me with IBM Thinkpads (until recently when I went Mac).  My wife and m-i-l
both had D600s and would have issues like the keyboard keys or supports
breaking, or random flakiness requiring reboots to fix.  This also happened
after a complete system re-install (I thought it was just WinBlows being,
well,
itself).  I have no doubt that part of it was because they were in the
hands of non-computer people users.  For example, my m-i-l clicks yes
on ANY button, so she now, frequently, gets re-images on her machine.
So my comments should be tempered with having to support bad users on
the Dell equipment as well.

-Scott
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