Does Dell make its own motherboards?

On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 18:57:53 GMT, Leythos wrote:

In article ,
om says...
I would recomend buying from somwhere like Dell if you are going for
the 4hr gold support (and actually need it) for 99.99% of other
requirements someone local will probably be more of a benefit and you
can just give em a quick call and not faf around with call centers.

And just who are they going to call for FREE? Unless you charge them for
phone support you are not comparing apples-to-apples. If you give phone
support for free, then you've built it into your hourly rate (or you are
loosing money on it).


That would have to be either factored into the original price or the
supoprt warranty. Much in the same way as shops do for items such as
TVs e.t.c.
--
Gamma gamma gamma chameleon
You come and glow, you come and glow.
Kick out the cats before you reply

On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 19:07:33 GMT, Leythos wrote:

While you can argue that Dell does not provide the same value as your
self-built system in your experience, many of us, with far more
experience with far more vendors, can assure you that Dell (and the
others) do offer more value than your seeing on your end.

One also very important point is that unlike quite a few mom and pop
outfits, they are not going to go out of business the following year
either due to not being financially viable or doing the old close down
and open under a new name loop hole (leaving you in the lurch).

Round here I've seem small operations come and go on a yearly basis.
--
Gamma gamma gamma chameleon
You come and glow, you come and glow.
Kick out the cats before you reply

So big names are immune to this then?
There are less of them. Most have crashed / been taken over / merged out of
existence.

Once there was the BUNCH. Burrows, Univac, NCR, Honeywell. Then IBM...
I haven't heard of Facom or Amdahl for yonks...
Oh, don't forget DEC, Compaq, Gateway made a big flop - is it still going?
Micron... Some names are different in other countries.

It depends on what you want, what you need, how much you are willing to pay,
where you are, service level you require, *toungue in cheek* how ignorant
you are, and what is available.


"Gama Chameleon" wrote
in message ...
On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 19:07:33 GMT, Leythos wrote:

While you can argue that Dell does not provide the same value as your
self-built system in your experience, many of us, with far more
experience with far more vendors, can assure you that Dell (and the
others) do offer more value than your seeing on your end.

One also very important point is that unlike quite a few mom and pop
outfits, they are not going to go out of business the following year
either due to not being financially viable or doing the old close down
and open under a new name loop hole (leaving you in the lurch).

Round here I've seem small operations come and go on a yearly basis.
--
Gamma gamma gamma chameleon
You come and glow, you come and glow.
Kick out the cats before you reply

"Tx2" wrote in message
t...
In article ,
Martin Alderson "martinalderson [at] gmail [dot] com", a.k.a says...


I agree, he must of spent at least an hour typing replies to these
posts, so I'd love to see him spend the 10-15 minutes speccing it up.

Why ... to prove what price I could do it for? What's the point?

I've already said I couldn't beat Dell. Not sure what it would achieve
to be honest. Ammunition for someone to take the ****? Sorry chum, I'm
not into playing silly games on usenet for the entertainment of others.

I've spent some time replying, yes, hardly an hour. It might have been,
if i was trying to be cocky and clever, but i've simply replied with a)
my experience, and b) spoken as i've found. If you don't agree with it,
there's not an awful lot I can do to change it.

I'm sorry that this has all got rather personal. You made a sweeping
generalisation - that anyone buying Dell is an idiot - and not surprisingly
all the people who have bought Dell jumped down your throat. :-)

There are clearly people who will benefit from your sort of hands-on support
and custom-built PCs. Reasonably technically-minded people, such as the
people on these NGs, are not your sort of customer though.

There is certainly an advantage in using standard parts, and I wish the
likes of Dell would do that. This is the main drawback of Dell (or HP/Compaq
for that matter).

There are significant savings in buying from Dell rather than you. (You
won't give any figures, but the PC I spec'd out cost 185 Pounds including
VAT and delivery from Dell recently, and I expect you would quite reasonably
want to charge over 300 Pounds.)

If I have to build up the systems myself, I would want to factor in my own
time plus the hassle of dealing with online component suppliers, so Dell
still works out much cheaper up-front.

The big snag (as you have pointed out frequently) is if something goes wrong
with one of the proprietary components, such as the PSU. That may mean
buying a new case, and possibly even a new mobo, as well as the new psu. Or
it may mean biting the bullet and paying Dell a silly price for their
replacement psu. Even so, there is probably enough saving in the original
purchase price to cover this. These PCs are pretty reliable in any case, so
it is quite likely not to be a problem.

I hope you now understand why it is a perfectly sensible choice for some
(non-idiotic) people to buy Dell.

Geoff

"Rob Stow" wrote in message
news:XbWCd.700700$Pl.678083@pd7tw1no...

While placing that order it was confirmed by Dell
that both the new and the old PSU did not have
standard ATX connections.

That is certainly my understanding, but I have never actually checked
myself. The wires are in a different order. Out of interest, how difficult
would it be to disassemble the ATX connector of a standard PSU and put the
wires into the order required by Dell?

I've got a cheapo PSU here that I've been fiddling with. I can't get the
little connector pins out of the ATX connector block. Is there a knack to
this, or are they intended to stay in forever?

Do you remember how many of the wires are different? My understanding was
that it was just a couple of wires that were swapped over. If it's only two,
I guess that it would be possible to cut the wires and splice them back
together in the right order.

Geoff

"Tx2" wrote in message
t...
In article ,
, a.k.a GB says...

I hope you now understand why it is a perfectly sensible choice for some
(non-idiotic) people to buy Dell

Firstly, i don't recall every calling anyone who buys Dell an "idiot",
so please quote me correctly.

Sorry, you are right - it was the poster before you, someone calling himself
Venom. :-)



I think you need to re-read what i have written, and then apologise for
suggesting I've made "sweeping statements"... and insulted people.

Sorry about mixing you up with Venom.

I worked on a 386 sx (?) for a while. Had a 8085 running CPM 1 in about 1981
with a whopping 5mb HDD and 64 kb ram. But then the mainframe I worked on
(which was huge) had 16mb ram, 2 processors, paper tape, punched cards, 14
tape decks, 28 HDD's (biggest was 600MB), etc...

"Wayne Fulton" wrote in message
. ..
In article , says...

Gosh I remember the day of ISA graphics cards and you could watch windows
draw the drop list of a combo box so sloooowly.

I still have an early Windows video performance test program named WinTach
(1992 from Texas Instruments) which measured speed of drawing real world
test
screens from Word, Excel, CAD and Paint software. Its result compared
speed
to a 20 MHz 386 with standard VGA video. We got real excited when new 486
50
MHz systems with 8 bit ATI video got 20x and 40x ratings.

My AMD 3500+ with Matrox G550(4x AGP) gets 2000x and 4000x numbers on it
:-)

I dont know how todays hotrod 3D cards might do, but we've come a long
way.

do a google. it is commonly (sort of) known. I read it a few weeks ago
somewhere out there ===

"GB" wrote in message
...

"Rob Stow" wrote in message
news:XbWCd.700700$Pl.678083@pd7tw1no...

While placing that order it was confirmed by Dell
that both the new and the old PSU did not have
standard ATX connections.

That is certainly my understanding, but I have never actually checked
myself. The wires are in a different order. Out of interest, how difficult
would it be to disassemble the ATX connector of a standard PSU and put the
wires into the order required by Dell?

I've got a cheapo PSU here that I've been fiddling with. I can't get the
little connector pins out of the ATX connector block. Is there a knack to
this, or are they intended to stay in forever?

Do you remember how many of the wires are different? My understanding was
that it was just a couple of wires that were swapped over. If it's only
two, I guess that it would be possible to cut the wires and splice them
back together in the right order.

Geoff

yes and your seagate drive from your local builder has a 5 year warrantee,
but the dell non seagate drive won't.

Big Names provide post warrantee / contract support for a [big] fee.


"Leythos" wrote in message
...
In article , says...
Once there was the BUNCH. Burrows, Univac, NCR, Honeywell. Then IBM...
I haven't heard of Facom or Amdahl for yonks...
Oh, don't forget DEC, Compaq, Gateway made a big flop - is it still
going?
Micron... Some names are different in other countries.

And you could get support for those companies for years after they
merged or closed. I know for a fact that Burrows (which merged with
Sperry to become Unisys - which my wife worked for during my time time
in the Navy) provided support via Unisys after the merger. The same for
NCR and Homeywell... IBM is still around. DEC was still providing
support years after, same with Compaq, Gateway, and Micron. Micron,
while not producing PC's under their name any more still has support
under the new company....



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(Remove 999 to reply to me)

a short run vendor specific board for a sony or dell (asus has supplied
mobos for both) are not as good as "retail" boards. 100,000 mobos is a short
run for a company that makes over 30,000,000 p/a. No offemce to asus - they
make under contract.

"Leythos" wrote in message
...
In article ,
says...
In article ,
om, a.k.a Gama Chameleon
says...

One also very important point is that unlike quite a few mom and pop
outfits, they are not going to go out of business the following year
either due to not being financially viable or doing the old close down
and open under a new name loop hole (leaving you in the lurch).

Of course, again, you forget that a self-build PC is usually built from
off-the-shelf parts, and as such is very easily maintained.

And neither are the majority of the parts in most of the large vendor
systems. Most of the parts are the same off-the-shelf parts you would
get anywhere. Vaio, E-Machines, Dell, Compaq, HP, etc... The only hard
thing about getting parts on those it getting a power-supply, their
cases support standard hard-drives, cd-rom drives, even standard
floppies.

Tiny were a PC manufacturer who went bust and left a lot of people in
the lurch due to the use of proprietary parts.

Any small time independent who goes out of business isn't going to have
the same impact on a business *if* they supplied 100% compliant ATX
systems.

But the point was the small business user or the home user - so a small
shop going out of business is going to have an impact on 100% of the
customers that purchased from them that are looking for Warranty
replacement of that compliant ATX power supply.

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(Remove 999 to reply to me)