Dell used to not suck

Not dissimilar to my approach either. My newest PC was built with a combo of parts I bought online from suppliers I'd used before and found reliable and also bits from a local small specialist store.

Using generic bits makes life quite easy.

Graham

Alas, I have had much the same problem with Dell - will never use them again. Cheap, with what sounds like good warranties. But having spent 5 hours on the phone convincing some malaysian that my hard drive was dead (smoke came out of it) *before* I got any on-site technical support, I now know their support aint what it purports to be. We bought 6 dell PCs (2000), and within a year had similar problems with all of them. In the end we gave up on Dells *free* tech support, and paid a local to do it for us, as it was cheaper (our time aint free)

Cheers Terry

PS what was the brand of good DCCTs you mentioned?

Me! Built my Athlon64 system from scratch over this past weekend, using parts I got from Kustom PCs (). I ended up buying an Athlon64

3200+ CPU, an ASUS A8V Deluxe mainboard, a Club3D geForce 6600GT 128MB, 512MB of DDR400 RAM and an Akasa Paxpower 460W power supply.

I already had an 80GB Maxtor D740X hard drive, a Sony MFD920 floppy drive and a LiteON LDW-851S DVD ReWriter. The DVD-RW, incidentally, is running a patched version of the SOHW-832S firmware, which means my lowly 851S can now burn dual-layer DVD recordables :)

The machine is rock stable, and I *know* what the build quality is like 'cos I built it myself! All the cables are folded, tied and tucked under metalwork as necessary. Shame it's in a closed box really. I should get a sheet of plastic from the local hobby shop and put a window in the case. That and respray it something other than beige and light blue...

Later.

--
Phil.                                | Acorn RiscPC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB,
philpem@despammed.com (valid address)| ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice,
http://www.philpem.me.uk/            | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI
No to DRM, software patents and the EUCD!  
... Hey!  Your Trakball is upside down!

Thanks John.

What, no case light? Take a look at the systems they sell on ebay... ;)

--
Regards,
  Bob Monsen

HP got some very nice boxes for their mini-towers. No Screws required!

The Way of Pain!

Buy the thing assembled, from a local outlet, so that you can trow it back at them for a refund when it does not work.

You pay, what, USD 75 extra for the assembled version, get a warranty, and you do not have to spend a day putting the box together and another day downloading drivers (and days returning stuff and arguing the toss).

So, Why abandon 2 years of warranty to the doubtful quest of integrating different components from different vendors who will all blame each other when something does not work??

I would install/re-install the OS myself though, from untainted media NOT the "system restore disk", "They" always manage to f*ck up preloads;

I think this is for two reasons:

1) The Prince of Lies, i.e. Marketing, put nitwit "tools" written by ebola-ridden monkeys* onto the machine, said tools main functionality is to splatter the company logo onto every visible display element, redirect keypresses to the corporate web site in the hope of getting some traffic to justify the USD 10000000 advertising budget.

2) Because they buy preloaded batches of the drives in the factory to save time & effort and then the hardware configuration is changed downstream by some "production engineer" so the OS no longer match the hardware.

*) The cheapest option: The monkeys died before they ate all the peanuts!

practically

The only questions you should have for the Fry's guys are 'what aisle are those drives on?' or 'can I get a raincheck?'. 4 of my 5 computers are Fry's and no problems. At least they put stickers on the resale items so you can avoid them. Now and then good stuff on eBay but as always, do your homework before you buy. GG

They used to not suck? Must have been before my time ...

YMMV, but I've enjoyed a good 6 months so far with with the top-end Sony pre-built from Fry's. Only had to add a couple external SATA drives for backup (one of which has already failed).

Very quiet system. 3.4GHz P4, 1GB, 250GB, 256MB video - for the same money, a better package (DRAM, VRAM) than the same Sony model elsewhere. I'm told it's liquid cooled, but it's all encased so it "just works".

I looked at rolling my own, but for the same money I got a turnkey system with extra goods - zero installation effort, and I can focus on some other project on the list.

Richard

...and to the Breton bombarde - but more so.

--
~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk

Dude, you're gettin' a cell.

--
  Keith

To paraphrase their old TV commercials, "Dude, their going to hell!"

--
Former professional electron wrangler.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Well, I have a company to run, and the last thing I want to do is struggle with more electronics and software; I want to buy a reliable PC with everything installed and working. I liked Dell because they'd ship a system that was ready to run out of the box, and if you needed support they'd answer the phone and help you right away. But the last two Dells I bought had junky packaging, a stupid design fault around the floppies, and they showed no particular interest in fixing it.

John

It seems that Dell has moved up the chain to where most of their revenue comes from large accounts. So if you are a small account, business or consumer, they aren't that interested.

Robert