Dell

[Ben Kelley]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 19:57:54 -0600, Jonathan Hutchins
<hutchins at tarcanfel.org> wrote:
> > Dell has always had a pretty decent reputation for rock-solid hardware.
> 
> Gotta watch that "a" word.

I wholeheartedly agree,  My experience with dell laptops was marred
with many many failures.
Mostly due to the fact that dell makes(kinda hard to call it make when
they just assemble commodity parts) stuff as cheap as possible.  Sure
everyone skimps, but not as much as dell.

My company also started focusing on dell and redhat for a server
platform. My opinion is this is a bad decision on both parts, but this
isn't an OS war we are having.  We haven't had any serious hardware
problems with any of the server class dells,  only minor things like
unstable firmware on perc controllers etc...
On a scale of 1 to 10 I would rate dell server hardware at about 7.5 or 8.
Laptops I would rate somewhere around 1.5 to 2.

I haven't used any newer compaq/hp server hardware, but the older
stuff was rock solid, except the fact that you had to boot smartstart
(windows cd) to configure the array, and you _have_ to use a mouse to
configure your raid, you cant just simply tab around thru it like the
dell perc menus. There should be no reason to have a mouse on a
server,  and the fact that you had to boot a separate os from a
partition or from the cd to change anything is really annoying.  But
other than that,  rock solid.


--ben