I Understand This Was A Bad Decision. That Information Can't Help Me Now

April 28, 2021 3:06 PM

Buying a PC with Dell: My Journey Into Hell by EyePatchWolf [ThreadReader]
posted by chavenet (243 comments total)

dude
posted by thelonius at 3:11 PM on April 28, 2021 [28 favorites]

Should have bought a Mac.

(I know, I know. You people have REASONS that are TOTALLY VALID as to why you hate Apple with the intensity of a THOUSAND BURNING SUNS but this nonsense would never happen with a Mac. It would have been different nonsense clad in a black turtleneck.)
posted by Big Al 8000 at 3:23 PM on April 28, 2021 [57 favorites]

Thank god for Newegg!

Though the risk of having a non-functional system on POST is rather higher, so much joy when you have the exact machine you wanted, at least before current component scarcity issues hit...

But now that Apple has gone native again with their M1 I may not have to build any more PCs, yeay.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:23 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

This was great. I bought a 5810 carcass off of eBay and I was pretty annoyed when I realized I had to make do with a SATA SSD. Also, I had to remove metal and rubber off the side panel to fit the right GPU in there. It was a cheap way to get a bunch of cores and 32GB RAM, though.
posted by michaelh at 3:29 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

It's really disappointing that not one rep figured out that Eyepatch Wolf was expecting to have an SSD, after they complained about a 2 min boot up time.

Also: Computer repair shops and experts are there to help you and reduce your frustration. You don't have to do everything yourself, especially if it causes this much confusion and anguish (as computers often do).
posted by Stoof at 3:29 PM on April 28, 2021 [13 favorites]

I turn, to you, the person reading this thread. What Should I do:

Take the offered refund and run.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:29 PM on April 28, 2021 [20 favorites]

Went from the seemingly-naive "I should note- I do not know a great deal about PCs" to neeeeeeding the newest non-rotating storage technology "The problem however, is that some computers are unable to boot off NVMes, it depends on your BIOS".
posted by achrise at 3:29 PM on April 28, 2021 [18 favorites]

Should have bought a Mac.

I don’t think that Apple is a perfect company, but they’ve done a really good job of putting together a sequence of computers that can be easily ranked from “most basic” to “most potent” that are consistently available. I’ve been honestly shocked at how, say Amazon will sell a PC by maker X that, if you go to maker X, has already been discontinued in favor of model Y, which technically they don’t sell themselves but will be available on date Z from… somewhere. Maybe there’s a way to shop for PCs that feels like shopping for a Mac, but I haven’t found it, and that makes me sad.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:29 PM on April 28, 2021 [29 favorites]

I feel like the lede here is buried in the third or fourth tweet where they admit it's their fault but then spend seventeen thousand tweets trying to make out like it's Dell's.
posted by parm at 3:30 PM on April 28, 2021 [47 favorites]

(i like my acer it works pretty good and also costs a third what a mac would cost and also i don’t have to switch operating systems between home and work which I find frustrating, but it’s getting to replacement age and this thread terrified me)
posted by showbiz_liz at 3:30 PM on April 28, 2021 [8 favorites]

Maybe there’s a way to shop for PCs that feels like shopping for a Mac, but I haven’t found it, and that makes me sad.

Falcon NW is close, but it comes at a price.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:32 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

I feel like the lede here is buried in the third or fourth tweet where they admit it's their fault but then spend seventeen thousand tweets trying to make out like it's Dell's.

I don’t think this is accurate, I would have had no way to know either that the supposedly top of the line computer I’d been sold was actually a hideous Frankenstein of unworkable elderly parts and missing critical pieces of Things What Make Computer Go. You should not need the ability to build a PC from scratch in order to avoid getting utterly fucking scammed.
posted by showbiz_liz at 3:34 PM on April 28, 2021 [82 favorites]

The €430 internal bracket was a bit suspect too but cool voyage to the depths of despair tho.
posted by mhoye at 3:34 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

"... stare at my machine. It has no dvd/bluray drive, so without internet, is just a giant piece of plastic that cost me 1000s of euro."

The farmer in the dell
The farmer in the dell
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer in the dell
posted by clavdivs at 3:35 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

I feel like the lede here is buried in the third or fourth tweet where they admit it's their fault but then spend seventeen thousand tweets trying to make out like it's Dell’s.

I think the deeper point here is that Dell shouldn’t let you mess this up. Dell should make it VERY clear that you are purchasing an HDD, not an SSD - two sequences of three letters that are easy to misread. (I don’t know what their store interface looks like, granted, but I would assume that this drop down is a fairly trivial dropdown.)
posted by Going To Maine at 3:37 PM on April 28, 2021 [15 favorites]

Dell makes a decent monitor. Or, well, repackages good quality panels at reasonable prices. I wouldn't buy anything else they make though.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:37 PM on April 28, 2021 [7 favorites]

Like, I think the general model should be that Dell is selling you a solution, and if that solution is inadequate they should do the utmost to make it right - maybe that means letting you swap an SSD for an HDD for more money, or buy new RAM, or whatever - but they should be invested in making sure that, eventually, you get as much computer as you wanted. (Apple doesn’t do this either, really, but you do get a decent warranty.)
posted by Going To Maine at 3:41 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

The poster does seem to have been rather sloppy for someone spending thousands of €, I brought a Dell a couple of years ago and the site gives you a readout of the various options once you've configured them, I was in no doubt about the HD vs SSD option. However, it's clear they were also selling a turkey, no modern computer should ship without a wireless card and even HD shouldn't be taking two minutes to boot up.
posted by tavella at 3:43 PM on April 28, 2021 [8 favorites]

The idea that they make HDDs and no wifi card the default is fucking nuts.
posted by mr_roboto at 3:43 PM on April 28, 2021 [49 favorites]

What drives me up the wall is that he had multiple service calls out, and somehow the return window lapsed anyway. That...should not be a thing that is allowed.
posted by General Malaise at 3:45 PM on April 28, 2021 [67 favorites]

This is a situation where a little bit of knowledge gets you in trouble.

I bought a Dell gaming laptop a few years ago. I plugged it in, works fine with the few games that I owned, clearly much better than what I had before. I was happy with it.

A few weeks later, I buy a slightly newer, shinier game. The game detects that the laptop is running a decent graphics card and ramps up the video settings. Hair physics or whatever, it's enabled.

The laptop consistently bluescreens after 30 minutes. This is where a much smarter person would realize they're still in the return policy and immediately contact Dell for a return and refund.

Not me though. I attempt to upgrade the graphics card driver - it does not improve things. I reinstall the operating system just so that I can reproduce the original error. I then reinstall the operating system using Windows' "clean" installation - now nothing works including internet. I reinstall a third time, and then install all the Dell crapware I can find, continually running the "self-update" features and sometimes getting new drivers. I run Dell's "stress-test" features that only rarely find problems. I begin to think that I was imagining the initial crashes, but then they happen.. sometimes. At the advice of the random forums, I replace random dlls and twiddle bios/graphics settings. I make sure there is nothing blocking the air intakes.

I grow tired of these problems. At some point, I change the graphics settings to "low/medium" and the game runs. My brain says "success" and I move on. The return period expires.
posted by meowzilla at 3:47 PM on April 28, 2021 [27 favorites]

Should have bought a Mac.

C’mon, that’s no better than “Here’s a nickel, kid. Buy yourself a real computer.”
posted by Monochrome at 3:47 PM on April 28, 2021 [19 favorites]

“I’m sorry sir, but you marked your order as “for business”, meaning that that your two week return window has been up for several days now, and Dell is under no obligation to refund your machine.” The repair guy (who didn't solve the problem, nor explain that it stemmed from a hardware issue) had to be rescheduled, which ought to have extended that window?
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:47 PM on April 28, 2021 [8 favorites]

This is why I build my own desktops. It really ain’t that hard.
posted by fimbulvetr at 3:48 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

As soon as he said "top of the line Intel XPS processor" I knew exactly what I was reading and it was just depressing but not for the reasons the author thought.
posted by Kinski's Ghost at 3:49 PM on April 28, 2021 [18 favorites]

I'm so confused as to why he didn't just send the whole thing back when it came without internet.
posted by betweenthebars at 3:50 PM on April 28, 2021 [7 favorites]

This is why I build my own desktops. It really ain’t that hard.

Is it harder than Just Buying A Damn Computer? How much time and failure would I, a person who barely knows how computers work, need to invest in such a project in order to be able to use the thing and also not electrocute myself?

I really dislike comments like this. Other people aren’t you.
posted by showbiz_liz at 3:51 PM on April 28, 2021 [133 favorites]

I'm sure this happened, but it's hard to judge who's at fault without knowing how EyePatchWolf bought this machine.

I just visited Dell's site using a VPN to appear as a customer in Ireland. I could not get the site to sell me a machine without an SSD and also spend over 600 euros. Maybe they've removed the offending selection since this story went viral?
posted by justkevin at 3:54 PM on April 28, 2021 [7 favorites]

I know this is about desktops, but I thought their laptops were decent? The XPS 15 has been my go-to recommend for relatives who don't want some kind of macbook.
posted by juv3nal at 3:54 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

The idea that they make HDDs and no wifi card the default is fucking nuts.

This is actually the least plausible part of this story.
posted by mhoye at 3:56 PM on April 28, 2021 [12 favorites]

The idea that they make HDDs and no wifi card the default is fucking nuts.

This is another disadvantage of buying stuff online. Companies list every single possible configuration they have online, including ones that only penny-pinching corporate accountants want but wouldn't sell / be instantly returned at a physical store.
posted by meowzilla at 3:57 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

I responded to this guy, admitting my own grievous error in having purchased a Dell last year. My old laptop (a Toshiba) was dying, and the whole teaching school from home thing wasn’t going to work on the other laptop I had, a six year old XPS with a 13 inch screen. The thing is, that computer still runs amazingly well. I thought, yeah, I’ll get another Dell.

Step one: finding out that Dell Japan only sells English versions of Windows 10 on computers that cost $1000 more than I wanted to spend. But, okay, the guy I spend an hour waiting to talk to assures me that I can just change the language settings, which is sort of true, but also mostly a top level cosmetic thing, as a good deal of the deeper, inner workings menus are still in Japanese.

Then, even more fun, the computer I just bought because I need to be on Zoom pretty much all day, as the host of classes, can’t hold a fucking internet connection. Every twenty or thirty minutes, the internet connection just dies. It took hours of waiting, then trying to get support to listen, and finally, they say they’ll send a guy to look at the wifi adaptor and the connection to see what’s going on, and if necessary, replace it.

So the guy finally comes, after I’ve dealt with a computer that I can’t rely on to hold a connection for the whole first term of the year. He there to replace the Ethernet card, and when I mention that it’s the wifi I’ve been having trouble with, he says no one told him that, and that he can’t help me. He doesn’t actually work for Dell, he is a contractor.

He leaves. I email the customer service rep. I receive no reply. I email again, no reply. By the time I finally get a reply, they tell me that it has been so long since they heard from me that my ticket has been closed, and that they can’t do anything to help.

So, from the bottom of my soul, fuck Dell, they sold me a lemon, made a half assed attempt to fix it, which they botched, and told me that they weren’t going to do anything further. Never again.

(It was also supposed to be able to play games and such, but chugs during Kentucky Route Zero, of all things.)
posted by Ghidorah at 3:57 PM on April 28, 2021 [21 favorites]

Is it harder than Just Buying A Damn Computer? How much time and failure would I, a person who barely knows how computers work, need to invest in such a project in order to be able to use the thing and also not electrocute myself?

If you can put together a simple lego kit, you can build a desktop. It USED to be a real pain in the arse, but modern computers desktops are dead simple to assemble. And you aren't going to electrocute yourself. I don't even know how that would be possible without, I dunno, assembling and then testing it in the shower?
posted by fimbulvetr at 3:59 PM on April 28, 2021 [10 favorites]

The idea that they make HDDs and no wifi card the default is fucking nuts.

It's easy to check Dell's website and see that all of their XPS desktops except the very cheapest one come with an SSD as the default option.
posted by teraflop at 4:00 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is why I build my own desktops. It really ain’t that hard.

That this is a tenable statement is a testament to how screwed up the industry is. “This is why I raise my own vegetables in the garden instead of buying from the store. It ain’t that hard.”
posted by Going To Maine at 4:00 PM on April 28, 2021 [58 favorites]

If you can put together a simple lego kit, you can build a desktop. It USED to be a real pain in the arse, but modern computers desktops are dead simple to assemble. And you aren't going to electrocute yourself. I don't even know how that would be possible without, I dunno, assembling and then testing it in the shower?

I've build four of five desktops. Linux machines at that. And I am done with it, thank you very much.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:00 PM on April 28, 2021 [19 favorites]

And I did say this is why I build my own desktops. You do you, I ain't gonna judge. I actively encourage people uncomfortable with the machines to get a Mac, the damn things just work. We got a bunch of them around the house for the other members of my household.
posted by fimbulvetr at 4:01 PM on April 28, 2021 [11 favorites]

I'm surprised that desktops are supposed to have wifi cards now.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 4:03 PM on April 28, 2021 [22 favorites]

In 2021 it's nigh impossible to build a moderately high-end desktop as a consumer because you can't get a current gen GPU.
posted by justkevin at 4:03 PM on April 28, 2021 [40 favorites]

I wonder how much money it costs Dell to even offer computers without SSDs or wifi, compared to people who accidentally buy them and get a bad impression of all Dell computers and swear off them forever.

A while ago all the car manufacturers stopped offering roll-down windows because it was cheaper to make them standard than to have their factory lines tooled to offer the option that no one wanted.
posted by meowzilla at 4:04 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

I just visited Dell's site using a VPN to appear as a customer in Ireland. I could not get the site to sell me a machine without an SSD and also spend over 600 euros.

Try their business site. The original thread mentioned it was classified as a business purchase, and Dell offers different versions of their products to businesses. I could easily understand that a business would not want a WiFi card as default on a desktop machine. A hard drive instead of SSD may be akin to the no frills econobox that car rentals buy from manufacturers.

I know this is about desktops, but I thought their laptops were decent? The XPS 15 has been my go-to recommend for relatives who don't want some kind of macbook.

My XPS 13 (bought through Dell’s business site) has not given me any trouble, and it’s faster/lighter/cheaper than the equivalent MacBook Pro of 2020. (Now that MacBooks aren’t Intel I couldn’t easily compare them.)

As far as I can tell the only way to get Dell to ship me a Linux laptop was to go through their business site. I noticed they offered the same laptop with slightly different hardware to regular non-business non-Linux customers.
posted by Monochrome at 4:05 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

Yeah, this is something like my regular experience buying computers, but that's because I run Linux and it's therefore totally my fault. If I buy a computer from a company like Dell using configuration options they supply, I would expect it to Just Work, and work well.

Actually I usually have less trouble than this with my Linux systems, because someone has usually run into the same problem I'm having before and has posted detailed instructions for what to do to fix it. Again, if I'm spending money for a proprietary system, I'd expect them to be able to provide quick and efficient support. The fact that I've been so often disappointed on this is a significant part of why I've switched to Linux, and honestly it's made my life easier, or at least less resentful towards faceless software companies on a regular basis.

Anyway, this was a great story, wonderfully told. I hope Dell takes something useful away from this (e.g., don't make it easy for people to accidentally buy a system with underspecced components, make sure the components their support recommends are actually compatible with each other) rather than just writing it off as a social media crisis management issue.
posted by biogeo at 4:05 PM on April 28, 2021 [6 favorites]

I think I figured out what he did. He decided he wanted to go high-end, so he picked out this puppy, which is only listed as a build-your-own on the Dell Ireland web store. He said it came with a metal handle, and that's the only case I can find that fits that description. There are tons of configuration options, but it does default to HDD and no network card. How he could have missed that fact, however, is beyond me.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:09 PM on April 28, 2021 [34 favorites]

"Went with 64 gigs of ram, and a top of the line Intel XPS processor"

Later...

"My PC tower was a precision 5820"

Other than "the wrong thing", I'm not sure what he ordered. The real story is that self-service is no service.
posted by krisjohn at 4:09 PM on April 28, 2021 [6 favorites]

If you can put together a simple lego kit, you can build a desktop.
You do you, I ain't gonna judge.

When you say something's dead simple and that you should just do it yourself, well, you're kind of making a judgment about what people should be doing. It is also really, really easy to come off as though you think people who can't or won't do this dead simple thing are either stupid or lazy.

The catch is that it's not even that simple. It's simple for you because you already know how to do it. You probably know what parts you need, where to source them, and so on.

I mean, I'm pretty comfortable with computers and know what all the fancy letters stand for, but it's been years and years since I've even considered building one on my own. (I've been using Macs for a long time, because I like them and don't need to customize my computer that badly.) I wouldn't really know where to start these days.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 4:10 PM on April 28, 2021 [32 favorites]

He says a Dell tech 'remotely controls my computer'...how, pray tell, was that done without an internet connection?
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 4:14 PM on April 28, 2021 [7 favorites]

This is why I build my own desktops. It really ain’t that hard.

This comment is typical tech bro passive aggressive bullshit. It clearly is hard, very hard, to a lot of people, otherwise there wouldn't be a market for pre built computers, and it would just be laptops all the way down.
posted by Beholder at 4:17 PM on April 28, 2021 [21 favorites]

you should just do it yourself,

I did not say that.

Sheesh.

I really don't care. Or judge. That would be weird.
posted by fimbulvetr at 4:17 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

This is why I build my own desktops. It really ain’t that hard.

Great tip for a guy who managed to buy a PC with no wifi card and an HDD!
posted by atrazine at 4:18 PM on April 28, 2021 [24 favorites]

He says a Dell tech 'remotely controls my computer'...how, pray tell, was that done without an internet connection?

He ordered a wifi card in like tweet 25 and the remote service call is at like tweet 40. Twitter is awful.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:19 PM on April 28, 2021 [14 favorites]

I find building my own computer fun, it is something I only do every 10 years or so because I'm cheap and it saves me money, and I was surprised about how easy it is now after all the headaches it used to give me years ago when I put one together last year.
posted by fimbulvetr at 4:20 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

If nothing goes wrong, it's maybe not too difficult to assemble your own machine, but if something is busted, good luck to any neophyte trying to figure out which of the many components is causing the problem without wasting a bunch of time.
posted by juv3nal at 4:20 PM on April 28, 2021 [12 favorites]

He says a Dell tech 'remotely controls my computer'...how, pray tell, was that done without an internet connection?

You have missed the tweet where he buys a cheap Wifi card to get the internet working.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:21 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

It's as a if a guy looked at the price tag on a combine harvester and assumed it was a Lamborghini.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 4:22 PM on April 28, 2021 [25 favorites]

That link you posted mr_roboto had way too many configuration options! I guess for the power user that knows what they want it's great but after a bit I just started scrolling down to see how long it went on for.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 4:22 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

I did miss that, thanks - my hatred for Twitter exceeds this poster's hatred for Dell...
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 4:23 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

Having just purchased a Precision 5820 five days ago (in what remains of America) it certainly isn't a super hand-holdy experience, but I know what I'm doing and I know exactly what role I need this machine to fill for my client. This person did not know what they were doing ("Intel XPS processor", no concept of ethernet's existence whatsoever) and should have got help from someone who knew what they were doing. This is why my client asked me to order the computer for them, because the last time they handled it themselves they got a $200 Walmart special that crashed and burned and they lost a ton of customer data.
posted by glonous keming at 4:28 PM on April 28, 2021 [12 favorites]

“Scott...it’s not that hard, Scott. Tell him, Wash.”
“It’s incredibly hard.”
posted by Huffy Puffy at 4:28 PM on April 28, 2021 [16 favorites]

I think mr_roboto has it correct -- he picked the option that lets you micro-configure your build, which is designed to allow people who need very specialist setups. Which is fine if you understand what you need, but he clearly didn't, so he ended up building a turkey.

I'm not even sure I can blame Dell here, they have dozens and dozens of pre-built configurations each of which they provide descriptions of what they are good for and limited options to configure within that space. He instead went for the option they provide for the person who might need six hard drives and an air gap.
posted by tavella at 4:33 PM on April 28, 2021 [35 favorites]

One of the first things I did in lockdown was to really bear down and focus and I finally got Red Hat to recognize my Soundblaster card
posted by thelonius at 4:36 PM on April 28, 2021 [48 favorites]

I'm surprised that desktops are supposed to have wifi cards now.

Means you don't have to snake a cat-5 through the basement and up to the second floor when you're in lockdown and getting anyone out to your house who can do it without cursing the air blue for a few hours is actually breaking the law. And you've got to get the system going to log into the thing that pays for the house in the first place.

So anyway, I bought a couple of sub$20 usb-wifi dongle things and it solved all those problems. Just plug the thing into a usb port and everything lights up like magic. It's worked great for the whole last year+. I haven't had to think about it at all until this thread, which is about the best thing I can ever say about a piece of kit. It just works without any effort or attention from me.
posted by bonehead at 4:43 PM on April 28, 2021 [9 favorites]

Soundblaster? That sounds familiar from my days trying to get video games to work on a one gig hard drive. One gigabyte!!! How could we ever fill it??
posted by Jacen at 4:47 PM on April 28, 2021 [8 favorites]

I'm not even sure I can blame Dell here

I suspect Dell knows it has a lot of room to improve its website UI and technical support, even for (or especially for) high-end machines that bring a higher profit margin, which is why they are offering a refund. Data in aggregate suggest that customer perception of Dell in this regard is poor to mediocre.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:49 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

Just make sure to load the driver into himem to keep it from stealing low memory.
posted by bonehead at 4:49 PM on April 28, 2021 [16 favorites]

It does look like most of the desktops don't come default with wireless cards, at least the ones I spotchecked, which I do find a little strange; the only people I know that bother to run ethernet to desktops these days are gamers. But they are pretty clear about it.
posted by tavella at 4:52 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

I feel very sorry for the guy, but jeebus christ, I cannot imagine just reading this as a damn tweetstorm in reverse. JUST GET A DAMN BLOG AND TWEET THE LINK TO IT if you have a lot of paragraphs to say.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:52 PM on April 28, 2021 [17 favorites]

Here is my lazy secret to building a desktop computer without bothering to know about all the most recent tech, because I really don't feel like researching all that crap, especially as I only replace my computer when the old one dies, which seems to be about every 10 years. I am on my 3rd computer since 2001, so all that knowledge would just be obsolete sometime around 2031 when I have to do it again:

I go to a site like Logical Increments, pick a price and performance range that seem reasonable, buy all the bits on their shopping list, put the bits together, stick in a Windows disk and wait for it to do its thing.

For laptops my secret is to buy a Mac.
posted by fimbulvetr at 4:53 PM on April 28, 2021 [24 favorites]

Aha, I think it's a business vs home thing -- when I checked home desktops, they seem to have wireless cards. So I guess Dell's experience is that business will run the wiring and therefore the wireless card will just make the price higher without attracting more buyers.
posted by tavella at 4:55 PM on April 28, 2021 [9 favorites]

I've had more use out of a chromebook for the past few years than anything else. It's a rock solid little web/socials appliance. I've even been able to do light work on it word/pdf style. Not going to replace my two monitor rig, but it's totally doable for making uniformed tech comments, based on a premillennial understanding of computers on web-bbs boards liek this one. Pretty good deal for a few hundos.
posted by bonehead at 4:57 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

What do I look for in the yellowpages when looking for a pro to buy me a computer? I hate shopping for PCs myself.
posted by Fukiyama at 4:57 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

I’m surprised that desktops are supposed to have wifi cards now.

Means you don't have to snake a cat-5 through the basement and up to the second floor when you're in lockdown and getting anyone out to your house who can do it without cursing the air blue for a few hours is actually breaking the law. And you've got to get the system going to log into the thing that pays for the house in the first place.

Cables are sometimes your friend, but 90% of the time I’m shocked at just how much life is improved by not having to deal with them. I can’t imagine buying a wireless charger for my phone right now, but have a sneaking suspicion that if I did it would become indispensable.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:00 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

It's as a if a guy looked at the price tag on a combine harvester and assumed it was a Lamborghini.

Except the computer versions of these look pretty much the same till you crack them open. And then you have to know what you are looking at.
posted by emjaybee at 5:00 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

good gawd. I want to help this man. BUT WHAT HAPPENS??????? The thread just ends and I won't be able to sleep.
posted by bluesky43 at 5:04 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

If you can put together a simple lego kit, you can build a desktop.

Here's another perspective on this.
posted by biffa at 5:05 PM on April 28, 2021 [9 favorites]

Sure hope no one else has ever bought something incorrectly, given the amount of blame bouncing around. If he did use that pick-yourself option it's overwhelming with very little to no explainers as to what the options are. And I'm someone with at least get-by-able knowledge of hardware. Then, you think maybe it's just a simple fix you can do yourself - which is a lot easier than going through a returns process or ordering a whole new machine.

While there may have been user error in ordering, which the thread admits, the company still failed at customer service. Starting with the custom build options layout. And customer service didn't seem to help and explain the options his order came with. Then they pushed back repairs and didn't offer a refund or any returns / exchanges options when he was seemingly just a few days out of the returns window. Dell could have probably made it right by swapping it out with another model.

I think the illustration here is that as technology advances, the options become confusing. And then the help is no longer help because often the customer service people aren't knowledgeable or it's too split up. And we are in a phase of capitalism that leads to blaming customers rather than just creating more info on websites or more helpful customer services. Along with incompatible options amongst technology, which is often to reduce cost on the company's part or create a need for people to buy new products.

Sure, the customer isn't always right. Most of the time they are wrong, actually. I've worked customer services and accounts management and it's made me despise all of humanity. I've had stuff thrown at me. But if someone genuinely made a mistake and asked for help I would do what I could to help them. And I know that the times I've been in a bind and someone bent the rules a little or told me my options it made me really respect them and the company.

Or the takeaway is a silly insight into losing your mind a bit just trying to get something to work. Haven't we all?
posted by Crystalinne at 5:05 PM on April 28, 2021 [17 favorites]

also there was a time, around 1990, when Dell service was excellent. I had them on the phone one time walking me through how to install a second hard drive and it took forever. they were very patient. and helpful.
posted by bluesky43 at 5:06 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

Shivers down my spine - my 5(?)6(?) year old Asus laptop is probably coming to the point of no repair.

The sheer time-wasting process of transferring files and software - not to mention that I probably can't load MS Office.

The imminent awfulness.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 5:16 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

There’s also an interesting tension here between “buying parts for your own machine is much easier than ever” and “Dell’s custom build tools are terrible”. Given that it sounds like Dell et al. are, in fact, doing a better job w/ prebuilt lappies & towers than I assumed (not my experience, but I may be a special case), the real gap in the market is for a good, consumer-grade version of the Falcon NW experience.

I still long for Gibson’s Sandbenders, and some kind of laptop/desktop hybrid where you can snap a monitor and keyboard into place on top of a motherboard-holding chassis.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:17 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

I do not purport to speak for the entirety of businesses, but in my experience wifi is much less often used in commercial and industrial deployments than in personal/residential, where it it almost exclusively used. Businesses tend not to deploy wifi unless they have an actual business use for it. It's more stuff to buy, more stuff to manage, licenses and yearly subscription licenses are often the norm in addition to the substantially higher cost of the hardware vs residential grade, and it's more headaches to maintain from a policy and practical perspective (do we run a open guest network for visitors? how do we keep the enterprise network secure and keep everyone's personal phones off it? etc.).

In my experience, executives get wifi. Conference rooms maybe get wifi. Sites where workers have handheld devices (inventory scanners, laptops mounted on forklifts) get wifi. Sites with lots of lingering visitors get wifi. Rank-and-file corporate workers with desktop PCs or the equivalent get ethernet drops and patch cables.

This guy bought a business workstation using the assumptions of personal and residential use.
posted by glonous keming at 5:18 PM on April 28, 2021 [6 favorites]

I'm taken back to my early 90's experience with a Gateway 2000 which did, as advertised have the capacity to expand memory - but only if I bought a proprietary expanded memory board from them that doubled the cost of the subsequent expansion. Although in that case it was simply mediocre engineering meets corporate extortion, without the extra helping of weeks of life spent on customer service holds.
posted by meinvt at 5:20 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

Oh, I'd agree, the customer service was bad, but even good customer service is rarely equipped to say "you have ordered entirely the wrong machine for your needs." They are focused on whatever specific problem you bring to them. There's something a little Dunning-Kruger about it -- Dell offers many pre-built options for people that only know what they want a computer to do well, but know very little about the pieces that will make that happen. He decided on a day's research that he knew better than that, but in fact knew almost nothing, and thus built himself a turkey.
posted by tavella at 5:24 PM on April 28, 2021 [6 favorites]

A few months ago, I had an experience with a brand-new-but-malfunctioning laptop that demonstrated to me that I have indeed grown up and matured. A week or two after purchase, my brand new Microsoft Surface Book 3 began restarting with no warning, no error messages, and no indication whatsoever that something was wrong. A younger me would have spent hours trying to troubleshoot and fix it; I have a background in IT, many computers that I have built, and more than enough education and experience to fix this myself! Older, wiser me spent 15 minutes poking at it before calling Microsoft to initiate a refund.

Best of luck to our friend who has made a few mistakes, experienced some bad luck, and has been the victim of some shitty Dell policies and practices. It's really shitty that they may not have offered a refund if he did have a large number of social media followers but not accepting the offer isn't going to fix Dell's policies. I understand that he feels that there are some ethical issues but it sounds like his pride is on the line and that's not a good way to make decisions.
posted by ElKevbo at 5:29 PM on April 28, 2021 [11 favorites]

Went to the Dell site, instantly found the PC they probably bought. Precision 7820 Tower. It's a workstation that's expecting your IT dept to built out and set up for you. The default is an HDD, no network, no wifi. But you can (and should) kit it out with all sorts of add-ons.

I think the biggest mistake was "I need this for work = I'll click "For Business" instead of "For Home" when I first go the Dell site." Or they went straight to "Workstations" without knowing how to configure a workstation.

If the Dell site said "For IT Professionals" and "For Individual Buyers" instead I think it would have avoided this whole misadventure.
posted by thecjm at 5:35 PM on April 28, 2021 [34 favorites]

Yeah, “For Business” is a really nonsensical category.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:40 PM on April 28, 2021 [7 favorites]

The lack of M.2 support on the motherboard rings true. Expandability is the area where manufactured PCs really fall short of self-assembled ones. PCI/RAM slots, SATA/USB ports, drive bays, power supply connections, power supply wattage headroom, and so on. They can't get away with screwing you on well-known numeric specs like clock speed and RAM, but you still end up with a dud.
posted by scose at 5:41 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

"This guy bought a business workstation using the assumptions of personal and residential use."

Indeed. And as such, the stock HDD instead of an SSD makes sense. Lots of business have no need for the increased speed of an SSD and will happily save money by going with an HDD.

Dell's support was pretty awful in a lot of ways and they have some dumb policies (and ridiculous prices for drive trays), but this guy did say he spent a "a day researching parts", so it's surprising (especially as a video editor) that he didn't spend some time researching storage options.
posted by jonathanhughes at 5:43 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

If you can put together a simple lego kit, you can build a desktop.

The actual assembly is easy, and you may come out ahead as long as (as is usually the case), nothing goes wrong. If anything does go wrong, you get to keep the pieces....

Choosing compatible parts takes a bit more research.

And I strongly suspect most of the people building their own PCs are falling victim to marketing to a degree they don't realize, and are not getting the performance deal they think they are, because that requires trickier engineering tradeoffs than they realize.
posted by bfields at 5:48 PM on April 28, 2021 [9 favorites]

Companies like Dell or HP provide an overwhelming number of options with no clear measuring stick for customers to judge them by. Your average consumer buying a mostly off-the-shelf computer probably doesn't know what all of the parts mean and how that translates to performance and they definitely don't know how they all might interact with each other. These companies can and should do better. They don't because the bulk of their business is not selling directly to the consumer. It is business contracts and to suppliers.

The trouble with DIY or even just researching configuration options is that many people don't have a good understanding of what all of the parts are and what they do. Computer parts are byzantine even for those of us that know them. There are so many versions of everything with different compatibility factors that someone without a lot of experienced may think they have a good idea of what is going on and miss something important. Earlier in my IT career I spent a lot of time sorting out people's misguided diy builds copied off the internet or misunderstood from reddit or wherever.

Reading this twitter thread I wish I could go back in time and tell Eyepatch Wolf to buy a Velocity Micro machine. Clearly they were willing to spend money and knew roughly what they wanted. I think something from the ProMagix line would have been perfect for them. There are premium PC companies out there with great customer service and well-built machines! I wish more people knew about them.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 5:49 PM on April 28, 2021 [8 favorites]

I know this is about desktops, but I thought their laptops were decent? The XPS 15 has been my go-to recommend for relatives who don't want some kind of macbook.

Same here. I bought a new XPS 15 last summer and to be honest, I've been pretty impressed with it - I needed a better laptop for work than my ancient Inspiron and it checked all the boxes. We'll see how it holds up long-term but so far so good.
posted by photo guy at 5:49 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

By the way, raise your hand if you guessed the HDD/SSD problem the moment you read tweet six. ("I boot up the PC, but where my 5 year old machine could boot in about 10 seconds, this is taking closer to 2 minutes… odd.")
posted by bfields at 5:51 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

Indeed. And as such, the stock HDD instead of an SSD makes sense. Lots of business have no need for the increased speed of an SSD and will happily save money by going with an HDD.

Those businesses need to be burned to the ground, the earth salted, and the ashes pissed on.

"Oh I know let's employ someone that costs at least $80K pa and then skimp on the hardware so they spend most of that time waiting for mechanical rust to fly around a spindle."

Literally the worst example of penny wise, pound foolish I could ever think of in business.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 5:53 PM on April 28, 2021 [20 favorites]

The part where I got the cold sweat of recognition was when he started to try to identify and buy service parts. A vendor like Dell doesn't even want to display service parts for a computer that didn't ship with those components in the first place (identified by the Service Tag). And even if you can figure out the part number you need (like a drive mounting tray) you'll find that they don't actually sell that part in the classic "click a button and put down your credit card" sense. It's offered only as a service part through an authorized technician, if it's available at all.

At least when I needed drive rails for an HP workstation a couple decades ago, HP would sell them to me. The only problem was they only sold them ten at a time. There's a strong possibility I still have some of them despite having recycled the workstation itself years ago.
posted by fedward at 5:58 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

I've been building my own PCs for years (or paying to have the parts I pick put together for me for the sake of convenience) so I've never really known the pain of being stuck with a particular vendor.

Also, I like Dell, I have a refurbished Dell Mini tower as my home media server and it works a treat. (I also like how you can take it almost completely apart with no tools) I wouldn't buy one new, but I respect the build quality.

Anyway, as someone who other people often ask for computer help, a lot of this is just like: "You didn't know what you were doing" but also rarely do I get to see just how painful it is for people who don't have my particular knowledge and experience to do something as simple as buying a computer that performs better than the old one.

So... I feel for the guy, but I hope he asks for help from a savvy friend the next time he decides to buy new hardware. It IS his fault and frankly he's only getting the customer service he is because he's got a big internet presence. Most people would be absolutely SOL.
posted by signsofrain at 6:04 PM on April 28, 2021 [6 favorites]

I've bought a couple of dozen Dells for friends and family, and a few tens of thousands for various workplaces over the years. A couple of Dells are my daily drivers (work and personal) and also still have a couple of dozen more or less elderly Dell hand-me-downs for various purposes (sigh...DOS still matters). I've seen some pretty major Dell screwups. I can talk all day about the things Dell does poorly. Because I've seen thousands of them.

This article is attention seeking bullshit. To be fair, I didn't read the whole tedious thing, because life is too short. It reads like a guy who went to a car web site, said "I'll take that one" because it's the color he likes, and then gets indignant when he gets it and realizes it's got a manual transmission and doesn't come with turbochargers and his old monitor is crap so it's not even the right color. And doesn't think the T&Cs in the sales contract apply to him. Because why doesn't the car web site know what he wants and give him exactly what he needs? So off to twitter to complain!

Dell ordering has basically 2 workflows: 1) 'you get X for Y price', and they show you what you get at least twice in the order process, then email you a BoM, or 2) 'customize', where they show you all options and have back-end logic to keep you from ordering mutually exclusive options (and point out things you might want/they want you to buy). It's not perfect (I recall you have to click on a tab at one point to see some details), but I've rarely screwed it up.

The point being, they show you what you are ordering more than once, and show you what you can order whenever they can. Sometimes it's a pain when they go "are you sure you don't want an upgrade to SSD"? "Are you sure you don't want to higher-end WiFi card"?

He also doesn't say (or I missed it) whether he ordered an XPS desktop or laptop (there is no Intel XPS CPU). Makes some difference. Things like I'm not sure you *can* order an XPS laptop without WiFi or SSD, and a desktop you might not want either (so you can, and I'll get to that later).

Also, it's been decades since Dell was the "buy whatever is cheapest on the open market and shove it in the box" provider. You should look at their supply chain these days...it's quite impressive. So let that trope go.

Boot time: Well, UEFI takes longer to boot. It's stupid and bloated. That's not Dells fault. 2 minutes? Sounds like the old one was set to 'fast boot' in the BIOS and the new Dell is set to 'run all the boot time checks'. This is not Dells fault; they erred on the side of "make sure it will work or gives a message as to why". Or to be fair maybe it's Dells pack of bloatware; google 'slow boot' and get a ton of ways to fix it. Dell isn't unique here; my new client issued HP laptop is packed with garbage. So is a friends Acer I peeked at recently.

Naw...better to twitter how bewildered and helpless you are for clicks.

SSD v HDD: No, SSD isn't the magic answer. The cost benefit that has to be evaluated is speed versus space. Lot's of people look at "I can get a 1T SSD or an 8TB HDD for the same price, so I'll take the extra 7TB". And some Dell bundles have HDD to save cost. That's not Dells fault. I have a year old Dell Inspiron under my desk with spinning rust because on that one capacity is more important than speed. It's not slow, and doesn't take 2 minutes to boot. And the price was right.

No CD/DVD: I bet it doesn't have a floppy either. But it has USB ports. And ethernet. It's 2021...are you serious?

Internet: Ethernet is 'internet'. XPS is Dells 'business class' PC. Not all businesses want WiFi, and no, every PC shouldn't be shipped with one. Even then, not all want the same WiFi capability, or have peculiar WiFi requirements. That's why there's an order option. But it's way easier to tweet about Dell not having 'internet' (moar clicks!!!) or how bad Dell is for not including something that wasn't ordered and possibly not wanted rather than pay attention or order a $4 ethernet cable and hook it to your WiFi router.

Customer Service: Herp-derp customer service sux0r, amiright! Well, that's low hanging fruit. But here, they can't help a guy who didn't order what he wanted? Then things go off the rails. Obviously, Dell sucks. Definitely a squirrely thing the return window, but I know I have in the past fought and won that battle. YMMV.

But he got a lot of clicks, and some uncritical reposts to aggregation sites. Social media win for him.
posted by kjs3 at 6:08 PM on April 28, 2021 [20 favorites]

Aw jeez, Rick! Aw jeez!

This thread is simultaneously reminding me that I need to get a new home computer, while making me dread doing so even more.

I’m running a 9-year-old Mac mini as my primary computer at home (which is also now my primary work computer). I’ve held off getting a new system for three years and have almost bitten at a few recommendations my tech friends have emailed me. But each time, I get locked into a little decision paralysis and put off the purchase again.

I’m particularly upset that Apple decided to raise the prices on their Mac Mini line, so it’s no longer the cost-effective, bare necessity choice that’s been my go-to option for my last two upgrades.
posted by darkstar at 6:10 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

I've disassembled many hundreds of PCs, laptops, phones, tablets, servers, and others. I've built probably >50 PCs. It's not fun, unless you enjoy plugging things into other things. Most people don't particularly enjoy that in my experience. Also, figuring out which parts go with what can be a massive pain, even when you know how.

Many of the machines I've taken apart, and a few I've rebuilt, were Dell or HP machines. I would not purchase either of those for business nor personal use, as they use non-standard parts that are not interoperable with what I call "commodity" PC hardware. Both companies are garbage to work with, and have been for a long time.

Personally I'm moving away from x86 in my computing world. I still have an old, beloved Core2 Duo laptop, which I hope some day to replace with a Pine64 board or similar. Intel chips have a long legacy of bad ideas and poorly-patched vulnerabilities (glossing over the unpatched ones), and new openish-source hardware is coming out all the time. I've replaced my desktop machine with a RockPro64, which lives in a case smaller than a VHS tape. It's powerful enough to meet all my needs so far (non-gamer tho) and it's all one board, so I didn't have to build anything apart from mounting the heatsink tape and putting the board in the case.
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 6:11 PM on April 28, 2021 [7 favorites]

Should have bought a Mac.

worst computer in terms of reliability I've ever owned (and the most expensive) was a Mac laptop. Still to this day, the only box I've ever had to bring in for servicing and I had to do it twice. The second time, I tried to get them to admit it was a lemon. It happens. They didn't. But they did tell me my battery probably didn't have much life in it so I'd be wise to buy a new one (it was just past the three year warranty at this point). I decided to wait. Eventually, I semi-retired that box into music station only service ... and that battery never failed. Five years later, it was still functioning.

I'm willing to accept I'm probably just an outlier here. It happens. But first I need Mac to admit they sold me a lemon. It happens.
posted by philip-random at 6:15 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

My current desktop is a custom gaming machine... Bought as open box off newegg. Actively harvesting some previous brief owner's research. It's worked great the last 3 years or so... Occasionally I murder someone in a back alley and upgrade the video card.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:16 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

My immediate thought going in to the Threadreader was "Dell, huh? I wonder if it's a Precision." And halfway through, yes, it is. The exact same Precision 5820 as is sitting on my work desk (though no doubt specced differently). Even with our government purchasing arrangements, this machine cost AU$12,000 about two years ago. It is all SSDs. DOG SHIT GOES WHITE IN THE SUN FASTER THAN THIS THING BOOTS UP.

Edit: Oh, and another thing, it was ordered with dual-Quadro-whatevers with an SLI bridge (I don't remember what it stands for and I know it's different to the old Scan Line Interleave tech that used to be used to pair graphics cards but it does basically the same thing so whatever) and Dell COULDN'T INSTALL IT. They can pop two Quadros in the thing, and they can supply the ten cent bit of plastic and copper that is the SLI bridge, but they REFUSED TO SET IT UP AND CONFIGURE IT.

Getting SLI to actually work properly has been a whole other issue but that's an NVidia issue. "Please close the following apps before enabling SLI: [lists every single thing running on the machine including Explorer]." Yeah ok sure. Fuck you, computers.

Anyway, back to the article!
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:24 PM on April 28, 2021 [8 favorites]

The physical part of building a computer is not that hard (although attaching the motherboard pins to the poorly-documented case switch leads is disproportionally frustrating) but speccing the machine and shopping for parts requires specialized knowledge, a substantial amount of time, a lot of research and patience.

Is easy to forget that after you've built a couple of machines, or if you keep current on tech news for fun or work.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 6:25 PM on April 28, 2021 [9 favorites]

Oh, and:

MetaFilter: different nonsense clad in a black turtleneck.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 6:27 PM on April 28, 2021 [14 favorites]

Sure hope no one else has ever bought something incorrectly, given the amount of blame bouncing around.

I sure have, however I had the decency to not write an interminable solicitation for sympathy/likes/whatever about it though.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 6:39 PM on April 28, 2021 [10 favorites]

"Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy." -Joseph Campbell
posted by otherchaz at 6:42 PM on April 28, 2021 [8 favorites]

I don't get the hate for this guy. He's pretty up front at the start, and repeatedly references throughout, that this is all his fault for getting in over his head. That doesn't really change the fact that his experience with Dell's customer service is, at least as he reports it, Kafkaesque in the original sense of the term. Nor does it change the soul-crushing feeling of realizing you've made a terrible, expensive mistake that you lack the skill to make better, something he describes in amusing and relatable detail. I dunno, maybe some people can't relate to the experience of having screwed up and finding that an indifferent universe is unwilling to help you.
posted by biogeo at 6:45 PM on April 28, 2021 [20 favorites]

the real gap in the market is for a good, consumer-grade version of the Falcon NW experience.

Falcon NW has quite a few smaller, lesser-known competitors, a lot of whom are competing with them on price (though maybe not necessarily on user-friendliness). 2 of my last 3 laptops (I don't do desktops, I do big ole laptops with actual graphics cards and huge screens, because that's just how I am) came from Xotic PC and I have no complaints about what I got or the price I paid for them. On the more recent one, I even messaged them saying something like "Hey, I'm going to add in an extra SSD that I've already got here at home when I get this, can you please do the burn-in test with a drive in that bay to make sure there's no heat or power issues" and not only did they do that for me, but they even sent me some extra tiny hard drive screws when they shipped the computer. (Sometimes it's the little things.) I don't know for sure that they would've stopped me or prevented me from buying a nonsense build like this guy's but they would've at least tested it first and I suspect they would've questioned it.

The laptop in between those two was a Dell XPS 17 and it lasted me almost a decade(!) and I never had any real complaints about that one, either. It not only "just worked" out of the box like Mac people love to say that Macs do, but the only reason it lasted me a decade was because it was very easy to swap out and upgrade hardware (add RAM, add an SSD) in the sort of way that gets you banned for life from Apple stores. So I can't really say anything bad about Dell, either; the only reason I didn't get another Dell when I was finally ready to upgrade to something vaguely modern was that they'd stopped making XPS with 17-inch screens.

So I dunno. No hate for Dell from me, but also no hate for customizing your own thing, however it is perhaps two flavors that are best not mixed. And I never really had any cause to interact with Dell customer service, so there's that.

FWIW, ordering from the business side of Dell rather than consumer side of Dell is (or was, like 11-12 years ago), if you're not going to try to customize stuff, a pretty good way to save money. Getting basically the exact same computer was cheaper through the business side than the consumer side of the site. Maybe enough people caught on to that particular flavor of rip-off that they've stopped doing that, anymore, but it didn't seem like an obviously terrible, "why would you do that??" idea to me just on the face of it.
posted by mstokes650 at 6:48 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

Is it harder than Just Buying A Damn Computer?

Based on the story this entire thread is about? Actually, kinda, yeah.

(I am sympathetic to this person's plight and though blame is to be shared amongst several parties, it does just sound like a massive clusterfuck for someone who just wanted to buy a friggin' computer.)

I was under the impression that about a decade ago, companies like Dell had finally given up on filling their boxes with random proprietary sludge in favor of just building PCs like everyone else builds PCs, using mostly off-the-shelf parts. Apparently I was wrong, based on the whole "can't buy an SATA SSD, you gotta buy the fucking plastic caddy for 400 EUR and then the SSD for I guess another 400 EUR, which probably could buy you an actual PC's worth of parts" part of the story.

Honestly, given that this person has a big YouTube and Discord community? Find someone in there to build the PC for you. I bet a bunch of people would do it for a case of beer.
posted by chrominance at 6:49 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

So the impression I'm getting is that Dell is basically an evil genie and it's your own fault for having the hubris to think you, a mere mortal, can order a computer. When you receive a computer with no transistors because you forgot to check the box (☐ addon: transistors [+$400]), well that's just poetic justice.
posted by Pyry at 6:52 PM on April 28, 2021 [8 favorites]

Sure hope no one else has ever bought something incorrectly, given the amount of blame bouncing around.

I sure have, however I had the decency to not write an interminable solicitation for sympathy/likes/whatever about it though.

Man, it’s his twitter account! You’re allowed to do whatever you want with your dumb web space! Then people can decide that you’re terrible or whatever, but the point of the Internet is to demand to see the manager, to be the manager, or to complain about people asking to see the manager.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:06 PM on April 28, 2021 [19 favorites]

(The internet is the complaint department, and usually no one is working there.)
posted by Going To Maine at 7:07 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

You’re allowed to do whatever you want with your dumb web space!

Yeah but it took tooooooo longgggg to go anywhere, and I'm saying that as a person whose last two AskMes are rambly and computer-related!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 7:11 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

XPS is Dells 'business class' PC.

No, it's their high end consumer/low end gaming line. Vostro, OptiPlex, and Precision are their business lines, though small business will sell some Inspiron and XPSes as well.

I'm way too tired at the moment to read an entire as-told for Twitter outrage story, but there's a bunch of stuff in there that doesn't make sense unless Dell Ireland is vastly different than Dell USA.
posted by Candleman at 7:12 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

the real gap in the market is for a good, consumer-grade version of the Falcon NW experience.

Falcon NW has quite a few smaller, lesser-known competitors, a lot of whom are competing with them on price (though maybe not necessarily on user-friendliness)…

So this is a bit more the case with the Xotic example than with Falcon, but the other thing about these custom PC builds is that they seem to be targeted to gamers. This guy is an artist, and he’s talking about mixing down podcasts. One part of this hole in the market is needing a bit more of a sell for customizing laptops for creative professionals. When I see ads for the Microsoft Surface (or, a million years ago, the VAIO), they definitely stress the idea of using them for creative work, but it sounds like this person has bigger needs. (Or thinks he has bigger needs, which should be the same thing when it comes to the market.)
posted by Going To Maine at 7:16 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think one thing that’s worth noting is that right now, the internet cost comparison optimization is actually putting people into situations where they accidentally buy bad computers, because Dell and other companies don’t want to put the full price tag up front, because that will lower them on aggregator sites.

I recently bought a laptop online. The price was fairly reasonable. Only when I got to the buying screen did I realize it was because the computer was the absolute bare bones and I would have to add everything on if I wanted it. I was lucky enough to (mostly) get it right, but not everyone will.
posted by corb at 7:22 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

By the way, raise your hand if you guessed the HDD/SSD problem the moment you read tweet six.

Actually, my guess was that it was some weirdly configured version of Windows or that the OS was searching for something it couldn't find (Internet? Bluetooth mouse?)
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:23 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

I have a Dell...and need a new computer soon. I will not buy a Mac, I need Windows. I will NOT BUILD ONE. What IS the new off the shelf desktop go to brand?
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:28 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

A hollow voice whispers, "Lenovo."
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:30 PM on April 28, 2021 [17 favorites]

So the impression I'm getting is that Dell is basically an evil genie and it's your own fault for having the hubris to think you, a mere mortal, can order a computer.

But the monkey’s paw makes the GPU more efficient!
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:30 PM on April 28, 2021 [6 favorites]

The last PC I ever owned was a Dell about 15 years ago. And that Dell is the reason why I'd be hard pressed to ever buy a PC again.

That computer was the stuff of nightmares.

Dell customer service/tech support were very nice though. They did their best. It was just a lemon of a machine.
posted by thivaia at 7:33 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

Yeah, this seems like a fairly average fml post from a internet dweller who admitted he messed up. It's easy for us to complain about length, but a few tweets a week over A Saga adds up.

Personally, it reminds me of dealing with a hospital phone system when I was trying to figure out why my bill was my months rent. (The answer was extremely poor wording trying to explain that it was the full total, not split like I'm used to seeing.) Much fun, going round the merry go round of 'they sent you to me? Really? Huhhh. Let me transfer you to the next department in the circle..."
posted by Jacen at 7:39 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

All I know from this is that the next time I'm in the market for a PC, I am checking the NO I DO NOT WANT A GODDAMNED METAL HANDLE button with the force of a thousand hammers.
posted by delfin at 7:40 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

"Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy." -Joseph Campbell

It's a great quote and rings as true as the oldest church bells, but he also advised to "follow your bliss", guidance which this site has laughed off more than once lol.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:41 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

XPS laptops have a pretty good reputation!

I expect the randomly high costs for simple things was that the business unit is used to dealing with people buying 100's of computers at a time and lucrative support contracts, so they are confused by a random person ordering one for their house and the pricing models not being set up for that.

Also pricing on PC components is totally crazy at the moment and the cost effectiveness of building your own PC has been overrated for the last 10 years or so, ever since DTC brands for gaming PC's have taken over from local stores.
posted by hermanubis at 7:42 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

Car analogy: this person decided they needed a new vehicle to drive around, occasionally carry groceries home from the shops, and maybe even haul a bit of furniture in a pinch, so they went and configured a heavy-duty Ford F-550 Crew Cab dualie with no truck bed in back, just a bare frame, and Ford sold him what he said he wanted.

The rest is all storytelling.
posted by glonous keming at 7:47 PM on April 28, 2021 [18 favorites]

Is it harder than Just Buying A Damn Computer?

Just Buying A Damn Computer is actually pretty hard, and companies like Dell make it harder.

You have to put up with some dumb youtuber hijinks, but Linus Tech Tips on the youtubes has a couple of "secret shopper" series where they had one of their then-unknown staffers go on the phone to order a ~USD1500 gaming box from Dell, HP, at least one "boutique" builder, and Cyberpower and Ibuypower which are the web-page versions of old full-page ads in Computer Shopper. Then they look at the machines they got, and *then* they intentionally "break" something that might reasonably have gotten busted in shipping and have the same staffer call tech support to try to fix it.

tl;dr: nobody really does well. In at least one of their secret-shopper series, Dell outright scammed them.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:49 PM on April 28, 2021 [13 favorites]

Complexity has huge costs for both the manufacturer and customer, I've often wondered if many of our products could be drastically simplified and benefit both.

Apple and Tesla have remarkably streamlined product lines compared to their competition. Though, you could argue whether they're successful because of, or in spite of their limited offerings.

If you buy a Samsung, there there probably 100 different choices, from the top of line S Series, the Note Series, then the lower end A series (A12, A32, A52, A72, etc), there's J series, C series, Galaxy Prime, Galaxy Pro, Galaxy E, Galaxy Max... it's seriously ridiculous.

There's a consumer psychology effect behind it it too: buying an iPhone means choosing between "no iPhone" and "new iPhone" and the jump in utility is large - you feel much better off after having made the choice. But if you buy a Samsung A52... you're comparing that against the A32 (slightly worse) and A72 (slightly better)... and doubt starts to creep in.

The sinking feeling this guy started to have when he felt he made the wrong decision is absolutely devastating.

Imagine a world where ALL computers took 2 minutes to boot up, there was no choice about it. He would have been much happier. 2 minutes boot up time is honestly not a huge deal, go turn it on and get a drink or something. His unhappiness stemmed from the feeling of missing out on a better choice, not from the actual pain of waiting 2 minutes for it to boot.

That's basically why Apple sells you 3 iPhones in different sizes but with the same processor chip inside - you basically can't make a bad choice once you've decided to go with Apple. (of course going with Apple in the first place could be a bad choice... but once you're in the door, you're good).

On a related story... if there's complexity, there will be errors, no matter how good your processes are.

I know one guy who bought a car thinking it had 7 seats, but it only had 5 seats! The company for years offered this SUV only in 7 seats configuration, but over time realized some consumers preferred having 5 seats (without the fold-away seats, the rear cargo storage room was significantly larger) and so they made the 7 seat default with an option to go down to 5 seats. Now, what happens is the the dealer just sells whatever they have on the lot at the time... and he only had a 5 seater model.

The customer drove it for a several months, then only discovered it had 5 seats... he apparently didn't pay attention to the feature list on the car because he had been a customer for "decades" having owned 2 previous generations of that SUV and assumed they all had 7 seats.

Basically: out of 100 users, only 50 of them use the 7 seats, so do you make 50 people pay more for a feature they won't use, and impairing the feature they will use (cargo storage) all to make sure 1 guy doesn't slip through the cracks and buys the wrong thing? Multiple this decision point by 50x and you could end up as either a Samsung or an Apple: both successful companies, of course.
posted by xdvesper at 7:52 PM on April 28, 2021 [7 favorites]

I'm at the end of my rope with my homemade, jury-rigged, Frankenstein PC. It's been...7 or so years old at this point, and it shows. I'm on the verge of getting one of those new M1 iMacs, which I could possibly have in my hands in a few weeks, but a voice in my head is saying "Calm down, you really want the 27" M1 (or M2?!) iMac coming out...later." That "...later" is driving me nuts, as it could be a relatively short wait until summer or so, or way the hell at the end of the year. Which would mean six more months of this slow and slowly dying Windows machine to deal with every day...

No. That's it. I'm getting the 24" and will stop thinking about it. Which is what's great about Macs--you just turn it on and it works. Expensive, but they last longer, so over decades it evens out.

I'm not anti-PC, more of an agnostic between the two, but I'm gonna go back to Apple for a while and see how much I miss Windows.
posted by zardoz at 7:54 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

My wife last year was going to buy a Dell. She spec'd it out, top of the line, and then before she ordered it she decided to build it herself. She'd never built one before, but I only looked over her shoulder and advised her on the solder paste on the cpu. Saved $500. When it booted up she'd ordered every part with rgb lights. I'm still jealous of her computer.
posted by Catblack at 7:58 PM on April 28, 2021 [7 favorites]

On that note, I have always had self built PCs from parts - "built" in that, I configured themselves, but paid the assembler to assemble it to avoid any issues with parts that come dead on arrival.

It's 6 years old today and still blazing fast. i7-6700K with GTX1080. Also 6 years old, the 144hz monitor with low persistence (black frame insertion) that just blows away anyone who has ever laid eyes on it. I'm like this tech geek who goes, I bet you have never, ever, seen moving images on a monitor like this before, it's like literal witchcraft. The black frames basically trick your brain into doing motion interpolation, so if we take the perceptual difference between 60hz and 144hz as a benchmark, this feels perceptually like 600hz.

Basically, PCs have hardly gotten any faster in the last 5-6 years. I would be really hard pressed to even know what to upgrade at this point. I am sure this will last for a full 10 years before needing an upgrade.
posted by xdvesper at 8:04 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

What IS the new off the shelf desktop go to brand?

Dell is fine. Lenovo is fine. I currently have 5 Dell desktops ranging from mid-tier consumer (~$450) to mid-tier gamer (~$1500) and have had 0 of the nonsense described in the Twitter rant. And a small stack of their laptops. Lenovo is also mostly fine but the small form factor desktops tend to die young (probably from heat). Cheap HP is awful and should be avoided. Their higher end stuff is probably fine but I've dealt with too much of their cheap stuff to risk it.
posted by Candleman at 8:07 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

Data point: my brand new Dell XPS 13 would not. Stop. Making. Weird. Noises. Thing sounded like an angry bowl of Rice Crispies. I googled it, apparently it was an unsolved problem with shielding or audio cards or something going back 4+ years, so I returned the damn thing after two days. Might be a great machine, but if it hisses and spits at me all day even when it's doing absolutely nothing? No thanks. I'll use my elderly 2015 Macbook Air til the new Macbook Pro comes out.
posted by cnidaria at 8:07 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

I have had a bunch of Dells. One I bought, the others my company bought and I inherited. The oldest, 10 or 15 years ago is still running fine. My last work computer had a hard drive controller failure, and I haven't bothered to try to replace it. The other two I inherited will boot up, but are very out of date. Seems they have chased the race to the bottom. Still happy with my main machine. Has lasted longer than my first iPad and my first MS Surface, (though the old iPad still works, just can't update anymore, FU Apple).
posted by Windopaene at 8:11 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have a Lenovo gaming laptop that I'm not especially happy with - it's a little temperamental, but mostly it's because I'm coming off a Mac laptop that woke up immediately. I've built every desktop computer I've had for twenty years. It isn't very difficult, but I still wouldn't recommend it for general audiences. If it intrigues you, for sure, go for it, hardest bit is knowing where to put the thermal paste. But if you're unsure of what you're doing and don't relish the prospect of maybe making $100 mistakes, I think it'd still probably be too stressful.
posted by Merus at 8:15 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

> PCs have hardly gotten any faster in the last 5-6 years.

I felt the same until I impulse-bought a HP gaming laptop on Black Friday with an AMD 4600H 6C12T CPU and started benchmarking it, to discover that mobile CPU at 45w absolutely spanks my i7-7700K 4C8T desktop CPU at 91w. Not saying you should go buy/build a new thing, but I was really impressed at the differences. Does it boot faster? No. Do software load perform work faster? Yes, noticeably.
posted by glonous keming at 8:17 PM on April 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

So I build my own machines, very rarely is it everything at once though, I've built one and then replace the parts until it's time to upgrade mobos once every 5-6 years. It's fun for me, but I've spent the years learning what to do, and the parts have gotten a lot simpler in the years I've been doing this. It's now hard to plug cord a into socket b instead of socket a. It's really not for everyone, and nor should it be. I mean I just had my own saga of a basic windows install not working and it took me more than a few days to fix it. I'd bought a new M.2 ssd and wanted to do a clean install of windows on it. Turns out for whatever reason, now matter how I dealt with boot order or partitioning, I had to unplug every other drive that was connected into the machine. It was an 'easy' fix, but it involved a lot of time doing diagnostics and troubleshooting, and it was a pain! I can understand how someone would have thrown their hands up in frustration, lord knows I was annoyed at a lot of steps trying to fix it.
posted by Carillon at 8:18 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

The sinking feeling this guy started to have when he felt he made the wrong decision is absolutely devastating.

Soundtrack for the thread
posted by flabdablet at 8:21 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

You have to put up with some dumb youtuber hijinks, but Linus Tech Tips on the youtubes has a couple of "secret shopper" series where they had one of their then-unknown staffers go on the phone to order a ~USD1500 gaming box from Dell, HP, at least one "boutique" builder, and Cyberpower and Ibuypower which are the web-page versions of old full-page ads in Computer Shopper. Then they look at the machines they got, and *then* they intentionally "break" something that might reasonably have gotten busted in shipping and have the same staffer call tech support to try to fix it.

And then they said "well, wouldn't it have been better to have that staffer just buy parts and done the whole DIY build-your-own schtick?" I haven't watched through it because it felt like it was going to be 100% fremdschämen and ecccccchhhhh. But if nothing else, it sort of highlights the suggestion that PC naïf's should just build it themselves is not entirely straightforward.
posted by Kyol at 8:30 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

My Dell machine (14 inch 2-in-1) has been great.

The service when I tried to access it has been... a nightmare. Ironically, it turned out to be a minor software fault, the machine is fine. But now my warranty is so tangled up.
posted by jb at 8:50 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

For people dreading updating their next deskstop PC, I'd recommend looking into your local computer stores. Not Best Buy or the like, but stores that sell components and pre-builts (and are often dealers for some of the big brands).

They'll offer pre-builts at a bunch of different categories and pricepoints based on commodity parts that they have on hand or know that are quickly sourceable.

Good shops will even chat with you about specific requirements and give recommendations.

A google for:

$mycity computer store

brought up the big 3, and the first page contained 3 more of the bigger/ better ones and a top 10 listcicle. Prices should be comparable to Dell at better component quality, and you can pay more for better. I know that my local fav even reserve some current gen CPUs and graphics cards just so they can sell pre-builts (at a better margin). I got super lucky and got a RTX3070 at MSRP a couple of weeks after launch.

n-thing what other people are saying about how physically building PCs has gotten more straightforward in the last 10 years.

I find parting out new builds fun, but as I alluded to, component sourcing - especially high end graphics cards - has been a nightmare the last year+. Partially covid (both supply and demand), partially crypto mining, partially new tech required for current gen silicon needing ramping up time.
posted by porpoise at 9:10 PM on April 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

I think the biggest mistake was "I need this for work = I'll click "For Business" instead of "For Home" when I first go the Dell site." Or they went straight to "Workstations" without knowing how to configure a workstation.

If the Dell site said "For IT Professionals" and "For Individual Buyers" instead I think it would have avoided this whole misadventure.

Exactly. If he'd clicked on the "For Home" section, he would have come to something like this; Dell has four XPS desktop systems (actually three systems, and one bundled with a monitor), all of which come with SSDs and wifi and frankly any of which would have served his needs much better for a similar price.

And yeah, the Home vs. Business naming is a little confusing, but he ignored every.single.hint. that he was skiing the black diamond run. The XPS desktops are pre-configured and there are only three of them; the configuration option is what warranty and what version of Office you want installed. The Precision workstations he shopped in instead have 32(!) different systems; the system he bought has 8 processor options, 35 video card options, 13 memory options, and 21 options for each of the six hard drives that can be installed. And the defaults are the most basic, which makes sense; something has to be the default with all those options.

It's like he accidentally walked into the restaurant supply store instead of the supermarket, and ignored the sizes of the packages and layout of the store and just kept demanding he wanted beef, and is now shocked when he has to take half a cow home and figure out how to make it into steaks himself.
posted by Superilla at 9:16 PM on April 28, 2021 [18 favorites]

A Lenovo might avoid all this nonsense.
posted by meehawl at 9:27 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

I won't go so far as to say that there is a lot of victim-blaming going on in this thread as that's a more serious matter, but it's 20-fucking-21 and purchasing a computer online from a well-established brand shouldn't have this many pitfalls. Especially for that kind of coin.
posted by turbid dahlia at 9:39 PM on April 28, 2021 [10 favorites]

yeah he fucked up the initial purchase kind of impressively but Dell's customer service sounds unnecessarily nightmarish to navigate & I empathize with the specific bleak despair you feel when your expensive technology does not work & you have no idea how to begin to fix it

like imagine if this story ended "Dell immediately escalated me to the customer service manager & she was like 'Dude you bought completely the wrong computer; it's outside the normal return window but I'm authorized to extend that, let's get your refund started literally right now and I'll help you pick out a replacement'"
posted by taquito sunrise at 9:55 PM on April 28, 2021 [29 favorites]

I’m running a 9-year-old Mac mini as my primary computer at home (which is also now my primary work computer)

My PC turns 10 this year and it's fine. I did install a video card a couple of years ago so I could play some games. If I were doing video production I might need something new, but I'm not. I keep thinking I should upgrade at some point, but it's more about FOMO than any actual need.

It was a pretty damn simple build, too. The PSU came with the case and the integrated GPU was fine for what I needed, so all I had to do was screw the motherboard into the case, plug in the power, and plug in the SATA SSD to make it just like a bought one. It was about as hard as screwing the stand onto a TV and plugging in a streaming box.

TBH, even more complex builds aren't that hard. I've literally talked people with no prior electronics experience through the process over the phone in less than half an hour back before we all had cameras in our pockets and video chat to help avoid confusion over language. And that included disassembling spares for parts. Remote support of sites in towns without any kind of repair shop can get interesting when things really go sideways.
posted by wierdo at 9:58 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

I recently bought an item from Dell and tried to apply a coupon code (that Dell had emailed to me) to my purchase. It did not work but did not explain why. I clicked the support chat link placed directly inside the shopping cart page: the agent it connected me to never said a word. I tried again and the second agent explained they could not help me because that chat link was only for business orders, not for home orders, and they had no way to transfer me. I tracked down a home chat link, and the third agent tried several things which turned out not to work before managing to send me a custom order link some hours later.

I don't know where I'm going with this but I felt excited to have a relevant anecdote. Customer service is hard?
posted by one for the books at 10:23 PM on April 28, 2021 [6 favorites]

It's just a computer, not an existential crisis. Would have been much funnier without the exaggeration, but while Dell obviously was horrible, it's not like it's all their fault - which while the guy admits it nevertheless he then still tries pass on the blame.
posted by blue shadows at 10:31 PM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

I hope that since it was a business model he at least got one without all the crap/adware preinstalled that companies seem to love these days.
posted by ymgve at 10:38 PM on April 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

For people dreading updating their next deskstop PC, I'd recommend looking into your local computer stores. Not Best Buy or the like, but stores that sell components and pre-builts (and are often dealers for some of the big brands).

That was my jam when we still had that kind of store in my town; they went out of business a few years ago. I have no qualms about putting the components together myself--it's a bit more than simply snapping Legos together, but not particularly dangerous. But you do need to know what goes with what and whether you're getting the kind of drive that you want and need and so forth. Ars Technica has had regularly updated DIY guides in the past, but they gave up in the current one because of parts shortages and just compared two different pre-made gaming systems in terms of upgradeability. I've read a couple of places that premade systems with a certain type of graphics card can cost about the same as the graphics card itself, thanks to the plague of cryptocurrency mining. I'm not terribly unhappy with the card that I have now, but the upgraded edition of Mass Effect comes out next month... we'll see. Anyway, yeah, it can be fun to put together and customize a PC, for a very particular value of "fun", but I can understand people not wanting to go to the hassle.

As for EyePatchWolf's experience, well, there's very definitely a performative aspect to it, and I don't really get people who don't obsess over things such as the exact type of hard drive and what not. I get that not everyone's like that and the different sections could have been labeled more clearly, and I absolutely believe that their customer service is shitty, because most customer service is--dealing with AT&T for internet service was and generally is a horror, especially because there's something about the way it's set up in my area (poorly) that required me to call them about once a year to restore my service, and they always act as if it's some freak occurrence and that I don't know what I'm talking about when, for example, I tell them which floor the service closet is on in my building. And it's not exactly like buying a car, because (AFAIK) you don't actually get to test drive the computer before buying it, so you don't know if it's got the equivalent of a stick shift. But still.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:59 PM on April 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

As someone who has been an Apple user for decades, my motivation is I want to open the box and have my computer work so I can do stuff with it

I hear stories about people who build their own computers, and all I can think of is Is it really that much cheaper?

Then again, I don’t want to have to build my own car or make my own shoes either. I want to travel around in them like it is a useful tool which helps me a accomplish tasks of my life.

I get that some people derive satisfaction from the “back-alley computer surgeon” thing. I have met people who can make their own shoes, I know folks who work on their own car engine like some character out of Happy Days or The Wonder Years.

Me? I’ll take the smoothe and shiny black-turtleneck-based bullshit over the kind of insanity this dude signed himself up for.

Smooth and shiny tutrleneck-based bullshit connects to the intertubes and brings me pix of naked people and BBC documentaries right out the box.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 12:28 AM on April 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

I absolutely believe that their customer service is shitty, because most customer service is

The rule (in any field, not just tech) seems to be that if you have to call customer service to ask them what the problem is, you're in trouble; the only way is to call customer service to tell them what the problem is.

That doesn't always work, either. When my internet provider buggered up an upgrade and left me without a connection, I was able to deduce the problem and explain to them what they'd done wrong (they'd failed to connect a wire at the exchange). Unfortunately they had to follow 'procedure', which involved (1) sending an engineer to my house to verify that my domestic wiring wasn't the problem (accompanied by a threat of swingeing charges if it turned out it was); (2) transferring the problem to another department, to check if the problem was in the wiring or junction boxes between my house and the exchange; (3) transferring the problem to yet another department, to check if the problem was at the exchange itself.

This took eight days, rather than the half hour or so it would have taken to go straight to the source.

I just happen to be a geek with reasonable tech knowledge (and I'd also pre-armed myself with a MiFi in anticipation of them screwing up, so I stayed online throughout). A regular consumer would have spent those eight days turning their computer off and on again every fifteen minutes and removing all objects from the house that could have been giving off bad radiation, e.g. TVs, fridges, scented candles etc., and finally would have been asked to sign a form in the name 'Crump-Pinnet' and then put their head in the oven.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:32 AM on April 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

A Lenovo might avoid all this nonsense.

Lenovo puts a function key where the left control key should be so only for that they need to burn in hell.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:34 AM on April 29, 2021 [12 favorites]

As someone who has been an Apple user for decades, my motivation is I want to open the box and have my computer work so I can do stuff with it

I hear stories about people who build their own computers, and all I can think of is Is it really that much cheaper?

Depending on where we are on the Apple upgrade cycle, and the influence of the accursed crypto, it's anywhere from "a bit cheaper" to "a quarter of the price". It's also kind of a different use-case - you're not going to be doing much serious gaming on the Apple machine.
posted by Merus at 12:52 AM on April 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

Lenovo puts a function key where the left control key should be

There's a BIOS/UEFI option to swap the function and left control keys and even if there weren't, it would be a worthwhile sacrifice to use the one true pointing device.
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 12:54 AM on April 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

400 Euro. 400 Euro for a new Dell 1tb NVME drive. I'm bewildered, im furious, third party drives cost a quarter of the price

This part at least doesn't sound that different than an Apple experience..

I did like that at least he didn't take the route of "well, they made it right for me, guess it's all fine after all!" - it's important to acknowledge the whole "most people don't get this treatment" thing.
posted by trig at 1:16 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Me? I’ll take the smoothe and shiny black-turtleneck-based bullshit over the kind of insanity this dude signed himself up for.

I don't really get this argument. It's not like the only choices are buying an Apple product or specifying every single component that goes in your computer. One can easily go to Best Buy or even Wal-Mart and buy a Windows computer that just works. There's (usually) a tax, but it's less than the Apple tax.

Hell, you can do the same on Dell's website if you simply don't choose the option to pick all the parts yourself.
posted by wierdo at 1:17 AM on April 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

Yeah, poor soul went Business and that's where it IS like building your own from NewEgg, you have to pick your parts but they'll assemble it for you. In fact, you can order 100 of them and receive a few shrink-wrapped pallets of machines just like you wanted. What they wanted was the Consumer side which is like BestBuy or some other big-box-store where you go "I want this one" and they yank the box off the shelf and put it in your cart and your set.

$WORK used a bazillion and a half DELLS from laptops to rack servers in the cluster. They're actually pretty decent if you know what you're doing.

(Back in the early 2k due to volume (user labs) we bullied Dell into guaranteeing that all of our ModelXXX machines had the exact same hardware so we could use a single OS image for all machines. No changing which graphics card or ethernet, all to spec.)

I'm pretty sure we had much more trouble with the Macs over the years.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:33 AM on April 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

A bunch of comments note "it has no network connection (because it has no WiFi)".

It DOES have a network connection; as it's a business model desktop it's supposed to sit on a desk, not be lugged around. And businesses have their offices wired, for various reasons. One is plain raw speed, another is security and yet another is WiFi contention if you have a dozen or more people working over WiFi close together using one access point.

This machine, like ALL current desktops from ALL vendors, offers a perfectly usable network socket. Instead of a shoddy WiFi card he should have ordered the required length of network cable to get from his desk to the router, plugged it in and solve that part of the problem.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:38 AM on April 29, 2021 [12 favorites]

They're actually pretty decent if you know what you're doing.

They're even pretty decent if you don't know what you're doing, provided only that you're humble enough to admit that you don't know what you're doing and pick the I Don't Know What I'm Doing ("Shop for Home") section of their website. There is nothing wrong with the business section, but no such section is ever going to yield a good experience to those who insist on making choices between things they don't understand the differences between.

I'm on team Doctor, It Hurts When I Do This.
posted by flabdablet at 2:37 AM on April 29, 2021 [8 favorites]

Based on the story this entire thread is about? Actually, kinda, yeah.

Expand this by the number of computer build sites available out there leaves a lot of room for unnecessary life lessons.

Difference between Scam and CYA small print gets harder to discern.
posted by filtergik at 3:25 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Tavella: Oh, I'd agree, the customer service was bad, but even good customer service is rarely equipped to say "you have ordered entirely the wrong machine for your needs." They are focused on whatever specific problem you bring to them.

My first job was Field Service tech (for systems that you could not just carry over to a repair shop unless you had at least a forklift and a medium-sized van). About the first thing you need to gauge is the level of expertise of the person calling in with a problem if you don't know them: are they just above the average end user, having had a box and software brought in by a systems house, or are they at a level where you can ask "open the back of the cabinet, note the error code* display near the top of the chassis, press the button next to it, and note the new error code". Also, we were trained in digging for the core of any problem, especially on repeat calls. So basically, is what the customer is telling me as being the problem just a symptom of what the actual problem is? And are they describing the problem in a way that would make sense** in a technical way? No? Then try to get them to describe it differently, at the level they can, interpret how you understand it and relay that back to the customer. Until you get to the point where you're confident enough that you actually have a valid problem description, or, if not, get a tech (could be you, else a close colleague usually) onsite to take over the troubleshooting.

The company also had the service mantra "do the right thing", so if you were dealing with some intractable problem at a customer site you could call for a replacement system to be installed temporarily and take the offending system apart at a repair centre, or indeed, even tell Sales they bollixed up and go work with that customer to get them what they should have ordered.

The remnants of that company are now part of HPE, and at work I have to deal with them for a specific line of systems we use. It is APPALING that they don't know the first thing about our configs that we (as Field Service back then) had immediate access to: hardware config, operating system and version, layered products, stuff that is relevant if not essential in knowing how to read error messages. Eleven times out of ten the first question we get is to send them the output of a diagnostic tool that is for an entirely different operating system; it's not only not available on this OS, there's not even a close equivalent. And in the most recent service call HPE asked ME for the part number of the part they would need to replace (and came onsite with the wrong part anyway).

* just a row of LEDs, no fancy displays yet back then.
** someone I know has the habit of using rather non-descriptive or even made-up cutesy terms to describe problems, actions and solutions. This has just stopped me trying to help him out as I don't care about trying to divine what he actually means.
posted by Stoneshop at 4:52 AM on April 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

From the sounds of it, he fairly clearly ended up on the custom 'build a business class workstation' section of dell's website. Which yeah, comes with a very minimal setup as defaults, because it assumes you know what you're doing because you're ordering a specialist bit of kit as part of a business IT department and will know what options you need to focus on for the performance you're after, and are prepared to pay for it.

Saying things like "a top of the line Intel XPS processor" shows he knows very little about what he was doing (which he admits) (XPS is the all encompassing Dell brand, and has nothing to do with the CPU). Business-class = expensive because it's reliable and has long support-life, not because it's good, or fast, or has the latest features, or indeed is easy to upgrade with off-the-shelf consumer parts. Business class gear assumes you're hooked up by ethernet, not wifi for example. Nor is the support focused on 'my computer is slow because I have no idea what I bought'. Though to be honest, not many kit-seller support teams are very good at diagnosing clueless problems other than outright hardware faults.

He should absolutely take the 'please stop on twitter' refund, and go buy a normal, off-the-shelf consumer grade PC with a decent graphics card. Maybe even from Dell! Or probably, talk to someone who knows *anything* about PC construction, even a salesman first. Buying stuff on the internet is great and all, but you can fuck up by the numbers with anything, not just computers, if you're buying expensive gear you have zero clue about. This is why you talk to experts first, or at least learn some basics...

Should have bought a Mac.

He'd probably have ended up with a last gen mac pro and a mechanical fusion drive based on that thread.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 4:53 AM on April 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

>> (i like my acer it works pretty good and also costs a third what a mac would cost and also i don’t have to switch operating systems between home and work which I find frustrating, but it’s getting to replacement age and this thread terrified me)

I had an Acer for years. I'm surprised it lasted that long - it was the 1825 model that had the screen you could rotate and collapse so it resembled a tablet. That was it's eventual undoing as it was a single design vector of failure. I had to build a back brace for it, and simply just left it to run my media station.

As a replacement I bought a very cheap Lenovo Thinkpad - 250, 300 quid. A couple of years later I bought another, same model, to run my media station after the Acer finally died.

I had a brand new Dell laptop for work. After a year, after an BIOS update, it failed to recognise the battery, so eventually became a brick.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 4:55 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

One issue I don't see in the thread yet is a mention of "right to repair". Apple's record isn't great in this area. Yes, I'm willing to pay for convenience, but I don't want shiny black-turtleneck convenience to be my only option.
posted by gimonca at 4:55 AM on April 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

That said, consumer-grade computers are just another appliance for most people. Buy it and forget it. I used to build computers from bits and pieces, nowadays it's more like buying a washing machine.
posted by gimonca at 4:57 AM on April 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

PCs have hardly gotten any faster in the last 5-6 years. I would be really hard pressed to even know what to upgrade at this point.

This depends so much on your use case.

In the gaming world, almost everything up to now has been written to work well-enough on an already-slow cpu from 2011 that they then underclocked and an also-underclocked 7870 and slow hard drive because that's what's in the ps4 and xbox1. So demands haven't really risen very much unless you want to push either to 4k or high refresh rates. Until this year. Now/soon, games will be written to work well-enough on a ryzen 3700 + 6800xt + fast ssd, because that's more or less what's in the ps5 and xbx.

For most productivity work, a newer cpu will be much faster than a 6700k, mostly because the core count has increased massively.

The real window where nothing was happening was more like 2010-2017, the time frame when Intel refused to give home users anything more than 4c/8t and didn't improve much on single-threaded speed either.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:00 AM on April 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

So... I feel for the guy, but I hope he asks for help from a savvy friend the next time he decides to buy new hardware.

When I needed to buy a new laptop a couple of months ago I traded an IT acquaintance some custom art for some very hand-holding laptop advice and ended up with an HP Envy 360 that works great. Barter economy is where it’s at.
posted by brook horse at 5:01 AM on April 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

I haven't watched through it because it felt like it was going to be 100% fremdschämen and ecccccchhhhh.

About the only thing they make fun of her for doing is that every time she snapped a component into the motherboard she'd pick the motherboard up, flip it upside down, and shake it real hard to make sure it was in.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:08 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Actually, my guess was that it was some weirdly configured version of Windows or that the OS was searching for something it couldn't find (Internet? Bluetooth mouse?)

Hmm.. 2 minutes? Sounds like waiting on a DNS timeouts to me. Which, if a new computer, makes sense as Windows will try to contact the Mothership for license activation.
posted by mikelieman at 5:16 AM on April 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

So, right at the top of his thread he mentions using Premiere and "rendering", which means he's doing at least some video work. Which means that maybe (MAYBE) a pre-built off-the-shelf-at-your-local-big-box-store computer won't do what he needs.

But part of the problem is that as soon as you try to research computer specs and needs it's very easy to wind up in a world of commentary and opinions - and there are plenty of examples right here in this thread - suggesting, implying, or outright stating:

1) Most pre-built consumer computers are worthless for much besides checking FB twice a day.

2) UNLESS you pay top dollar for a maxed-out version.

3) WHICH is a giant waste of time and money because they (Dell/HP/Lenovo/whoever) still probably won't get it "right."

4) WHICH MEANS it is more cost-efficient - in actual dollars spent and value-for-money - to build your own or custom-order exactly what you need.

5) (And this is the big totally unexamined assumption that shows up A LOT in discussions about computers) AND ANYWAY WHAT IS THE ENTIRE POINT OF OWNING A COMPUTER IF YOU DON'T MAX OUT ALL POSSIBLE SPECS BECAUSE THAT IS JUST WHAT YOU DO.

IOW, this is a guy who's looking for a new car, thinks, "Well, I will need to haul some stuff so I guess a sedan or a compact won't really do", and next thing you know he's down the rabbit hole of Internet Opinions that convince him that rather than buying any one of a dozen hatchbacks, small to medium SUV's, or minivans, what he REAALLLLLY NEEDS is a giant 4x4 pickup truck with the off-road and max towing packages. AND that he should assemble it himself.

And now he's up shit creek without a paddle.

And yeah, bluntly, some of y'all computer nerds right here are contributing to this, this . . . attitude about computers, where you're mainly concerned with the computer itself as an isolated thing to be maximized, not the actual needs of the end user.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:26 AM on April 29, 2021 [23 favorites]

Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey: I hear stories about people who build their own computers, and all I can think of is Is it really that much cheaper?

The latest computers I built were not available to buy in any shape or form from any vendor, except maybe as utterly special order from a custom builder for at least five times what I paid for them now. But that was a clear case of "These are the hard requirements, and it's the least amount of bother to just build them myself."

Other desktop systems were nearly all partially recycled or incrementally upgraded, and this tends to be easier with generic 'loose' parts, not some vendor chassis and mainboard as those tend to need at least a few vendor-specific parts for any add-on.
posted by Stoneshop at 5:33 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I hear stories about people who build their own computers, and all I can think of is Is it really that much cheaper?

iMacs start at $1299, and you can price a "superb" PC on Logical Increments for $1174. I can't find all my receipts from the last time I bought my computer, but probably bought about $700 of new parts and reused some stuff from my previous build. Maybe that's a bad comparison because component prices have gone up so much, but the $800 "Good" build on Logical Increments is probably a reasonable point of comparison.

Is a $1300 iMac probably better than my $700 self-built PC? Certainly - it has 8 cores and a better GPU and it's very, very pretty (though I can't imagine buying a PC with only 250 gb of storage!)

But that's nearly twice as much. $1300 would be a ridiculous expense for me unless I genuinely needed a $1300 computer to do high-powered graphics rendering or something. (Even $700 is kind of an overindulgence, if I'm honest. I bought it just as I was almost finished paying off my grad school-slash-unemployment debt.)

And - which is almost more important - when I rebuild my computer I can save money cannibalizing my old machine for parts. If I buy an iMac I have no choice but to buy a new monitor, new mouse, new keyboard. Which is not great from an environmental standpoint either.

I'm not saying it's a bad decision to buy an iMac. They are VERY pretty, and the convenience of having everything already assembled and in one small cute package is a big selling point. I'm just saying, yes, it really is that much cheaper, and that's not a trivial upgrade for a lot of people.
posted by Jeanne at 5:35 AM on April 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

If anyone wants to slip into my PMs and tell me how to buy a gaming laptop without literally every insufferable nerd on earth blaming me for my abject failure to consider [some fucking thing or other] I would greatly appreciate it.

I just want to play Civ 6 without it taking 3 minutes between turns ok I am not trying to apprentice as an electrical engineer
posted by showbiz_liz at 6:09 AM on April 29, 2021 [14 favorites]

Going to Maine: (The internet is the complaint department, and usually no one is working there.)

Also, the abuse and arguments departments, rolled into one. And those are indeed working, including in their spare time.
posted by Stoneshop at 6:13 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Can I just pause to remark how crazy stinking stupid expensive graphics cards are these days? I'm in the midst of speccing out a bunch of workstations for our modelling group, who really do benefit from CUDA, and even getting a pair of last-but-one generation cards (GTX?) for one computer is more than we paid for four even five years ago when we did the last buy.

I knew the crypto-bugs have turned this into a crazy market, but we're looking at prices more than a reliable sensible car for each of these. Reminds me of the old SPARC system prices, when workstations were 20k each. And then got their lunches devoured by PCs a few years later. Makes me wonder if we're due for another major hardware shift.
posted by bonehead at 6:30 AM on April 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

We had to buy a laptop for my spouse yesterday and didn't even consider a brand other than Lenovo. They've been nothing but great for us.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:42 AM on April 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

About 18 months ago my coding/computers-obsessed 13-year-old started nagging me about building a gaming computer. I did some electronics hobbyist stuff at his age and told him, "well we'll get an entry-level soldering kit and start practicing" and he looked at me like I was from Mars or something.

He proceeded to show me a few videos on YT of people doing builds, introduced me to pcpartpicker.com, which has build guides and advice and will test if your selected parts are compatible. Then he made some alerts in NewEgg and other sites to track when his desired parts hit certain price points and over a few months we snapped them up.

Cutting to the chase, one Saturday afternoon we spread the parts out on the dining room table, fired up a build video on a laptop and got to building. A few hours later -- we took our time -- we flipped the "on" switch and... nothing.

Turns out building a computer is a lot like building with Legos, in that we just didn't snap the RAM sticks in firmly enough. You really have to push those suckers and make sure they're tight to the motherboard. Then we flipped the "on" switch again and for about $1,150 they have a kick-ass gaming computer. For better or for worse...
posted by martin q blank at 6:56 AM on April 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

It's also kind of a different use-case - you're not going to be doing much serious gaming on the Apple machine.

I know what you mean, but there's plenty of people gaming out there who prefer genres of gaming that aren't AAA resource hog titles, and the idea that they're not REALLY serious has been used over and over in all sorts of BS gate keeping.

Like I'm pretty sure you can play Minecraft on either of my Macs, and I guarantee that at least as much time and thought has been put into playing that game than any AAA first person shooter you care to name.
posted by Gygesringtone at 7:11 AM on April 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

Slapping together some components is not that hard, but reliably running the system as a whole at or near its performance limit takes a lot of knowledge. It takes a lot of knowledge even just to know the difference. Does the CPU wait unnecessarily accessing RAM memory because the RAM's not interleaved? Does the motherboard have particular requirements to enable that? Does the SATA bus run at full capacity or is there something in the configuration that makes it fall back to a low-performance mode? Does the network driver actually enable the high performance features on the card? Does it continue to do so after the computer wakes up from a sleep state? Can all the heat get out fast enough not to trigger a thermal alarm after a couple of minutes, throttling the CPU? And so on. Actually testing all this stuff and the myriad interactions takes gobs of time and expertise and it's what distinguishes brands like Intel or Apple or Lenovo from no-cost, no-name manufacturers. I would actually include Dell in that list as I've had good experiences with their business equipment as well as their service. Except Dell is not so proud that they won't sell you a lemon if you ask for one.
posted by dmh at 7:17 AM on April 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

I work in a large building full of government-furnished Dells. Previously I was at a string of large midwestern academic institutions, which were also generally full of Dells. The nice things I have to say about Dell largely center around how dead easy it has always been to get information and specs on individual machines, because of the service tags. I have on multiple occasions plugged in service tags from machines that should rightly have been in museums, and found info on the Dell support site. It's also been nice that the cases and disassembly have improved to be largely or completely tool-less, which comes in handy. Easy disassembly + a whole lot of machines in one building = when a given computer is running poorly, there are ALWAYS sources of compatible parts to fix it or bump RAM.

Having said all that, I'm really, really glad that the computers I have at home are not Dells. They're fine, really. But comparing the build quality of the giant-ass Dell laptop I use for work with the 15" MacBook Pro I'm typing on now? Yeesh. They both have an Intel Core i7. They both have 16 GB RAM. But the Dell manages to feel creaky and flexible despite being over an inch thick, not to mention that it weighs as much as a baby rhinoceros. The Mac can easily be held in one hand. The Mac can go from completely powered off to fully booted and logged in in less time than the Dell takes to go from login screen to usable desktop (still loading apps in the background!). The screen on the Dell is OK I guess? And yet, even though it's the same height as (and 2 inches wider than) the screen on the Mac, I find myself squinting at it; it is weirdly hard to read and feels too cramped. Mac peripherals (keyboard, trackpad, earbuds) are responsive enough that they feel like they are hard-wired even though they are all BlueTooth. Meanwhile I keep a wired mouse next to the Dell because the Microsoft Surface BlueTooth mouse I use with that machine disconnects randomly every so often for absolutely no reason... and the headset I use ALWAYS (a) shows up 3 times in the audio device menu and (b) defaults to way, WAY too high a volume every single time I connect, leaving me scrambling to find the RIGHT one on the audio list and turn the volume down before I go deaf during meetings (and no, the volume buttons on the headset itself do NOTHING). Notably, the same mouse and headset were paired to my Mac without any issues pre-pandemic.

And yes I am fully aware that some of those issues are OS-related and not Dell-related, but any comparison of Windows box with Mac really needs to take into account the fact that having the hardware AND the OS built by the same company makes a HUGE difference in how well everything meshes together in actual practice.

Another bit that doesn't get mentioned often in these comparisons is the support. When you buy a Dell you get access to their support people, who are exactly as helpful as we have all come to expect from phone- and internet-based customer service. It's hit or miss but never painless. When you buy a Mac, assuming you are in range of an Apple Store, you can bring your device in and talk to an ACTUAL HUMAN who sits down with you and discusses what is going on and runs a bunch of diagnostic tests and sometimes, depending on the problem, can send you home THAT DAY with a fixed system. The satisfaction of actually talking to a live person who makes you feel as if your issue is their highest priority just cannot be overstated. No phone tree navigation secrets needed, just make an appointment at the Genius Bar (it's a silly name but really having live in-person assistance was a brilliant idea).
posted by caution live frogs at 7:20 AM on April 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

If anyone wants to slip into my PMs and tell me how to buy a gaming laptop without literally every insufferable nerd on earth blaming me for my abject failure to consider [some fucking thing or other] I would greatly appreciate it.

short answer: 8 core ryzen and at least 1660 ti.

Asus G14
HP Omen 15 w/amd cpu
Lenovo legion 5 15
Eluktronics rp-15 (if you're in the US; the same tongfang chassis is sold by other folks elsewhere)

...and then watch review videos about them. Me, I like mobiletechreview and hardwareunboxed. But when push comes to shove, only mobiletechreview has (is?) a middle-aged woman who's been looking at these things for decades.

At least the HP and Lenovo have intel models available too; these are okay if they've got a good discount on them or if the AMD versions are just unavailable but you should expect the intel versions to be louder and hotter.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:40 AM on April 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

Slapping together some components is not that hard, but reliably running the system as a whole at or near its performance limit takes a lot of knowledge. It takes a lot of knowledge even just to know the difference.

THAT was some serious gatekeeping bullshit to scare people about computers. Never have I ever bothered to worry about any of that crap, and my computers just happily chug along. Maybe if you are building some kind of high-end gaming computer or professional rendering rig you need to think about that stuff.

Geeze.
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:43 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Enh, on re-read maybe I'm being unkind about your comment as it seems to be more about big companies vs no-name builders.
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:48 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

For all the people being like, "how did he miss that?" let me tell you about the blender I just bought. In early April I decided I wanted to start drinking smoothies again, but I wanted a small blender just for that purpose, that would be easy to clean. I also didn't want to spend a ton on it since I keep getting whims like this in COVID times and who knows how long this one will last? I decided to buy a Blendjet, which is basically built for this exact purpose. I'm surprised to learn they are only available on the Blendjet website, but I see the language that says "get yours today!" and the two-day shipping and figure I'll have it within the week. I order one.

Then I get the email that says it will ship by May 20. Huh? I email customer service. They inform me it says right below the order form that it will ship by May 20. Welp, turns out they're right. I've also accidentally signed up for a subscription to their "smoothie packs" when what I thought I was doing was redeeming an offer for free smoothie packs. They did cancel my subscription but I was SOL when it came to the shipping date, because ... they're not ready yet. Hence not available for purchase anywhere but their website.

I'm pretty savvy but I just missed the language that said it'll ship by May 20. Looking at the options on the Dell Ireland website, it seems like a similar thing happened. Just like I assumed "get your blender now" meant "get your blender now," this guy assumed a machine he was buying for business purposes in 2021 would have a hard drive that worked and the ability to connect to the internet as baselines. Fortunately my mistake was only worth $50 and a couple of months' worth of smoothies.
posted by lunasol at 8:13 AM on April 29, 2021 [10 favorites]

This is having the perverse effect of making me want to buy a new desktop. My laptop is fine, but I want pooooower. Also, I never move it from my desk.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 8:32 AM on April 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

The problem is he walked right past many many machines and packages that would have done exactly what he wanted, and decided to go for the the option where Dell allows you to configure exactly what you want if you have speclalized needs, and then a) was incompetent at figuring out what he actually needed b) didn't read the webpage when he was picking out his system. It gives you *21* options for hard drive, including no hard drive at all. And it's not even a dropdown, they are big boxes on a page. Did he not ponder what size drive he wanted at all? I find that hard to believe, which would mean that he would have looked at those options, including the many options of SSD.

"Blaming the victim" requires there to have been a victim. He was not a victim; he went to some effort to get to the page that let him avoid having Dell give him a preset working system, he specified the exactly system he wanted and Dell sent it to him. He was just incompetent.
posted by tavella at 8:52 AM on April 29, 2021 [8 favorites]

And yeah, bluntly, some of y'all computer nerds right here are contributing to this, this . . . attitude about computers, where you're mainly concerned with the computer itself as an isolated thing to be maximized, not the actual needs of the end user.

I am the end user. If I was interested in helping, I wouldn't have to tell people at parties I was an arms dealer instead of a computer geek.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 8:54 AM on April 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

He was not a victim

In a sense he was, though. A victim of his own incompetence/hubris/lack of attention.
posted by Stoneshop at 9:08 AM on April 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Even if he was at fault for buying the wrong computer, the customer service sounds like a nightmare... they straight up lied three times about making an appointment with him, and him missing the appointment.

The last time I had a Dell as my work computer, a slightly-absurd XPS 2010, it took two phone calls with customer service for them to figure out that, unlike most other Windows machines, there was actually no option to turn off tap-to-click on the trackpad, and I would just have to put up with it.
posted by pinothefrog at 9:13 AM on April 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

I knew the crypto-bugs have turned this into a crazy market

Not just graphic cards. Over here, Philips sounded the alert that they can't get semiconductor components for love nor money at the moment for their medical equipment because of this nonsense.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:43 AM on April 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

I am struggling to understand the folks defending Dell's "sell you the rope to hang yourself" approach to desktop computer configuration. Why, in the year of our lord 2021, is the default configuration for a high-end workstation not an SSD? I can sort of understand making it an opt-in premium feature in 2012, when they were new and expensive, but why even give people the option of accidentally hamstringing themselves on their primary hard drive? On a 1TB drive it's like an $8 difference in price. Much like the cost differential for a motherboard without some sort of built-in wireless, it's so little that it's reckless to even offer it as an option, much less the DEFAULT option.
posted by Mayor West at 9:58 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

The problem is he walked right past many many machines and packages that would have done exactly what he wanted, and decided to go for the the option where Dell allows you to configure exactly what you want if you have speclalized needs

so I'm trying to replicate what he did on the Dell website for funsies & I'm guessing he got to the splash page, saw "Laptops / Desktops / Workstations," thought "computer I am buying for audio processing == workstation," & clicked on that

at which point the website assumed he knew what he was getting into & showed him a bunch of workstations without his ever having seen a consumer desktop option

then he probably read the blurb about precision workstations which says:
Precision workstations are the #1 workstation brand in the world, offering Dell’s highest performing, most reliable and fully customizable mobile workstations for professional applications.
& thought "that's great, I need high performance for my professional content creation"

at no point does the website tell you you're opting into a different thing from just buying a computer that's gonna work off the shelf, the product copy isn't full of red flags that suggest a home office user TURRRRRN BAAAAAACK NOWWWWWW [/mortal peril voice]

then if you click on one of those workstations it gives you a nicely framed page with the computer you just clicked on and the Add to Cart button, a page that looks like a normal page you would buy a consumer desktop on

the customization options require you to scroll the page down and are part of an optional-looking tab labeled Tech Specs & Customization, a person who did not know what they were doing and who thought "workstation" meant "desktop PC that is powerful for processing" could easily think "oh I don't need to customize it, the standard model will be fine for my needs" without ever scrolling down at all, let alone halfway down the page which is when you find out the thing doesn't come with a wireless card

like it's not that Dell owes it to its users to give them clear signals & hinting when they are on the wrong part of the website buying a computer that as-is does not include normal functional computer things, but it's totally understandable to me how this guy got from the initial misguided "workstation" click to purchasing a computer without a network card & having no idea he'd done that
posted by taquito sunrise at 10:08 AM on April 29, 2021 [16 favorites]

Why are people assuming it had no network card? It assuredly did. It just did not have a wireless network card. Have we already forgotten that cables are a thing?
O tempora, o mores.
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:13 AM on April 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

it gives you a nicely framed page with the computer you just clicked on and the Add to Cart button, a page that looks like a normal page you would buy a consumer desktop on

The Irish version of your example looks a lot different though. You don't get a predefined choice, you have to select your hard drive etc.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:14 AM on April 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Speaking as a crypto bug with a vested interest in seeing the price of Stellar Lumens go to the moon, I would appreciate it if people complaining about the terrible side effects of cryptocurrency would put the blame for those where it actually belongs: on Proof of Work cryptocurrencies in particular.

I would be a very happy camper if I could persuade everybody to pile out of Bitcoin and Ethereum and into any cryptocurrency not reliant on a Proof of Work consensus protocol. Federated Byzantine Agreement, as used by Stellar, does not require exotic hardware or vast energy consumption. Hell, you can run a Stellar node on a Raspberry Pi.
posted by flabdablet at 10:19 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

But that's not what he did, taquito sunrise; if he had picked that configuration, he would have indeed gotten an SSD, in fact you *literally* cannot specify a HD for that configuration. He carefully hunted around the site until he managed to find the "build exactly what you want from every bit of hardware we have available" option. I haven't even found the path where he managed to do that, as opposed to a direct link to build your own.
posted by tavella at 10:20 AM on April 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Mayor West: it has been mentioned several times already that he was on the Business side of Dell's ordering system, which is meant to be used by people, commonly working at some purchase department, or at least as a designated Buyer of Stuff for a small to medium-sized business, who want to order something very specific to their needs, and in numbers quite a bit larger than one. No need for wireless? It should be left out. And the starting configuration offered is not at all a high-end workstation, it's a middling and probably solid workhorse that offers quite a lot of expansion options: SIX harddrives, RAID controllers, up to 512GB memory, but you have to know what you want to get. Which, once more, he just didn't.

As an aside (literally), on that DELL site I get a window sliding in from the right: "Don't know what to choose? CHAT" or words to that effect.
posted by Stoneshop at 10:24 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Here’s the thing: if you don’t understand computers, ANY purchasing experience is maddeningly confusing, so he had no reason to think “huh this is weirdly confusing, maybe I’m on the wrong page.” It’s all fucking confusing!
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:25 AM on April 29, 2021 [17 favorites]

If I am about to spend €2000 on something I don't know much about, and the website I'm looking at confuses the pants off me, then I ask for advice instead of stumbling around in the dark until I find myself the owner of something that I did not want but definitely ordered.
End of.
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:28 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

But that's not what he did, taquito sunrise; if he had picked that configuration, he would have indeed gotten an SSD, in fact you *literally* cannot specify a HD for that configuration.

Not aiming to be combative & I think I might have to surprise-drive to Texas in a minute but afaict the one I linked comes standard with an HDD?
posted by taquito sunrise at 10:30 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Oh, right, that's the US site TS was on. The Irish version gives you more options, you have to go pages deep in the US one before you can even find one that doesn't use SSD. But HD vs SSD is still part of the 4 items of configuration they put on the main box for every computer on the selection page on the Irish site. They aren't being stealthy here.
posted by tavella at 10:30 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

edit: oh! unless you're saying the option he went with does not come standard with an HDD; I wrote the previous without knowing what he eventually went with
posted by taquito sunrise at 10:32 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Possibly I was looking at a different link! But again, the Irish selection page puts four items front and center for every single model and configuration: the defaults for processor, the OS, the memory, and the storage disk. They aren't just hidden in some dropdown on the configuration page.
posted by tavella at 10:35 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I worked for Dell many many moons ago so I'm partial to them, but I think a lot of people miss out on the best way to buy one - the outlet. Refurbished, same warranty options as the new ones, and often "refurbished" means "a business bought too many of these and shipped some back" or similar never-booted-up situations. Used to be you could get to the point where you found out the specific service tag of the system and could look up its history, but I'm not sure that's still true.

(Of course none of this solves the problem of not knowing what parts you need in the computer to start with.)
posted by restless_nomad at 10:36 AM on April 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

If I am about to spend €2000 on something I don't know much about, and the website I'm looking at confuses the pants off me, then I ask for advice instead of stumbling around in the dark until I find myself the owner of something that I did not want but definitely ordered.
End of.

I don’t believe he thought he was confused at the time, which is often a problem in these situations.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:36 AM on April 29, 2021 [8 favorites]

thread soundtrack continues
posted by flabdablet at 10:38 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I soured on Dell a few years ago after I won a powerful Precision laptop workstation in a raffle at a trade show. The computer was powerful, all right; much more capable than the relatively new (but low-end) MacBook Pro I had been using, but I immediately noticed that the hardware was just not as nice (the trackpad, especially, seemed crude when compared directly with the MacBook) but, hey, free computer!

This particular workstation could take one of two batteries; a larger battery which took up essentially the full width of the case, or a smaller battery that left room for you to install a second drive to augment the 256 GB SSD that the computer shipped with. My free version had the worst of both worlds: it used the smaller battery, which had a frankly pathetic lifespan (maybe four hours?), but it did NOT come with any extra storage. I thought maybe I'd treat myself to the larger battery but it wasn't available (!) on the Dell website, which was clearly not geared to cater to after-purchase upgraders. Couldn't find the battery elsewhere on the Internet, either. If I couldn't get the battery, I wanted to take advantage of the option for more storage, so I called up Dell Customer Service.

(Note that, like the originator of the linked Twitter thread, I am dealing with a business laptop, not a consumer laptop, so I was on the phone with that branch of the company. For what it's worth.)

I can't remember the details of the call, but I know my opening gambit was, "Hello there! I have a new Dell Precision 3800 workstation and I wanted to explore my upgrade options." Somehow the battery was a no-go — after I spent a long period on hold, I think they might have told me it was "out of stock" — so I asked about the ability to install a disk drive next to the smaller battery. I think I had found Internet info indicating that I would need a special mounting bracket/caddy to hold the drive in there, and I asked about that, too. The guy on the phone seemed unsure about, well, everything, but he spent some more time looking this up and eventually told me that yes, I could install an off-the-shelf disk drive. I brought up the bracket again, and he eventually allowed that, yes, he could ship me a mounting bracket/caddy for a surprisingly reasonable price of something like $14. Amazing! I said yes, please, and thank you.

About two weeks later I received a small envelope in the mail. It was quite lightweight; felt like it had literally nothing in it. When I opened it, I found a little Ziploc baggy with a single tiny screw inside of it. Maybe 4mm long. I was really puzzled until I unfolded the accompanying packing slip and found this was the "mounting bracket" I had been promised. For $14! I laughed and laughed and laughed and then I suffered along with the base configuration in that laptop for the next few years.

A couple of months ago, I finally went on eBay and found the large version of that computer's battery, ordered it, and installed. It went well and at least I can use the computer for six or seven hours now without a recharge. But the point of this message is I can absolutely imagine Dell Customer Support being not only unhelpful but downright clueless with a problem of this sort. They just don't seem to have any idea how to help people beyond PACK THE BOX, SHIP THE BOX.
posted by Mothlight at 10:38 AM on April 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

afaict the one I linked comes standard with an HDD?

The starting point for that system both on the US and on the Irish site is with a 500GB HDD. But, and this surprises me not in the least, the Dell US site has a different list of options (including storage) than the Irish and the Dutch, so it could well be easier to end up with a SDD in an US-bought 5820 workstation. The general layout of the option list is the same though.
posted by Stoneshop at 10:42 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Dude wrote he had a top of the line Intel XPS processor, which isn't a thing. His box does use a Xeon processor so maybe autocorrect botched it up, or he got confused as he typed.

He has over a million YouTube subscribers, which is a big deal, so while he may not be tech savvy, he is savvy enough to write a super long twitter thread that has gone viral, been noticed by Dell, and he ended the thread with a poll to maintain engagement.

Even if he didn't plan out the readership and internet discussions spawned by his tweeteriah, it was probably super cathartic just to write it all down and push it out there.

He bought this computer for video editing. For most non-techies with heavy editing needs, the easiest thing is to buy the best gaming computer you can afford. Loads of RAM, powerful CPU and GPU, fast and large SSD are common to video editing and gaming needs, and there are tons of prespec'ed gaming boxes to choose from. The wifi card would have been the only possible hiccup when choosing a gaming machine.

Or buy a Mac :)
posted by praiseb at 10:49 AM on April 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

praiseb: "For most non-techies with heavy editing needs, the easiest thing is to buy the best gaming computer you can afford. "

That is quite literally how I specced out the microscopy system I acquired about 10-ish years ago. And when the microscope was retired, I swapped in an SSD, and repurposed the whole system as the Debian server that hosts my son's Minecraft world. So I guess it ended up as a "gaming rig" after all?
posted by caution live frogs at 11:06 AM on April 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'm probably late to this thread to be of any use to anyone, but in the event someone reads this: if you buy a Dell buy ProSupport. They are far more responsive and helpful than standard support. My three-year-old XPS 15 was experiencing issues and they replaced it with a newer model that had improved specs (more RAM, bigger hard drive, better display)---no questions asked. The new one also remained under warranty for another additional year (to be fair, it helped that we're still in lockdown, which gave me reason to decline the visit from the tech)
posted by hoyle at 11:09 AM on April 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

THAT was some serious gatekeeping bullshit to scare people about computers. Never have I ever bothered to worry about any of that crap, and my computers just happily chug along.

Huh, that never crossed my mind but there you go. You're absolutely right that most parts will happily chug along, it's not hard or scary at all. It's just that if you're looking to squeeze some sweet spot of price/performance or power/performance, there's also worlds to explore.
posted by dmh at 11:42 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Missed the edit window, but if memory serves, the Dell with the 3-year top-tier support was 40% less than the comparable Mac without an extended warranty. I believe it's intended for (very) small businesses and freelancers, that is, situations that don't warrant an ongoing company-wide service contract.
posted by hoyle at 11:47 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

You're absolutely right that most parts will happily chug along,

That was way less common up to about the mid 1990's, and the warnings from that era still linger. Like various flavours of RAM, single- or double-sided, EDO or FP, all with the same form factor but your motherboard chipset could only deal with one and not the other, or just one type at a time and not mixed, or double-sided only in the odd-numbered slots (and no mixing), IDE harddisks that would only work as master, or single, or not as a slave with brand X as master but no problems with brand Y. Stuff like that.

Occasionally there's still some of that; the systems I use as file servers require 1.33V (LV) SO-DIMM memory and just stay dead when you stick a 1.5V SO-DIMM in (it's clearly marked in the manual, no surprise there), and it's also not uncommon for mainboards to just not work with particular processor series even if they have the correct socket. But you're not going to encounter that when ordering a configured-to-spec Dell/Lenovo/HP, because those combos would not pass Engineering and be offered for sale.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:05 PM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

If anyone wants to slip into my PMs and tell me how to buy a gaming laptop without literally every insufferable nerd on earth blaming me for my abject failure to consider [some fucking thing or other] I would greatly appreciate it.

They come like the tides, the only real solution is to float above them.

I just want to play Civ 6 without it taking 3 minutes between turns ok I am not trying to apprentice as an electrical engineer

I don't know but based on what you described earlier in the thread I'd speculate it could be a power supply problem. Which is harder to address with a laptop than a desktop I think. Basically, your kitted-out components pull lots of power, and in total it could be more power than your laptop can comfortably supply. If your computer is trying to pull more power than its supply can provide, the voltage can start to fluctuate, which will cause hard crashes under high-load conditions. That sounds a bit like what you described which is what makes me think it's a possibility. Heat management could also be an issue but it sounds like you already tried addressing that.

In a desktop, I would check the power consumption ratings for my various components (given in watts), add them up, and make sure I have a power supply installed that is greater than the total, with a bit of a margin (an extra 10-20% at least) for comfort. The big offender here is graphics cards, which tend to pull lots of power, and I think there are rules of thumb for the wattage of your power supply based solely on the wattage of your graphics card, which should work fine if you don't want to figure out the wattage of your other components to add them up. In a laptop I'm not sure what your options are, since I think the power supply is built into the motherboard and/or limited by the amount of current the battery can supply. I would assume any laptop marketed as a gaming laptop should be spec'ed to provide enough power for a high-end graphics card, but maybe this is something you need to look out for when selecting a system and/or the graphics card you put into the system.

TL;DR, yeah, there are non-obvious factors that go into selecting components for a high-end build. Saying that it's easy to build your own system is true in that assembly really is a lot simpler than most people think, but false in that selecting the components to work together requires a certain amount of specialized knowledge and it's easy to get in over your head really quickly, as the guy in this Twitter thread discovered.
posted by biogeo at 12:53 PM on April 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Civ 6

Civ6, along with a limited number of newer games, actually can take advantage of extra CPU cores - so there are game-specific build recommendations. For example, Civ6 actually doesn't strictly require a super fancy graphics card, and if you aren't normally stuttering then the graphics card doesn't contribute a lot to long end-turns.

In some turn-based games there are menu options for turns - see all movements, see nearby movements, abbreviated movement, (or the like) etc.
posted by porpoise at 1:06 PM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

. In a laptop I'm not sure what your options are, since I think the power supply is built into the motherboard and/or limited by the amount of current the battery can supply.

Gaming laptops often run on maximum performance only if you power it directly from the nearest substation they're on mains, and they usually have comparatively humongous power bricks. On battery they would fall back to some low-end graphics option built into the chipset or the processor instead of using the graphics card, saving power (and generating less heat).

assembly really is a lot simpler than most people think, but false in that selecting the components to work together requires a certain amount of specialized knowledge

Even more so when you have specific requirements that this system is supposed to meet.

Which means plying someone knowledgeable with the appropriate bribes if you feel you're not up to it.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:25 PM on April 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

What I've learned with this post and thread:

1) The guy should've paid closer attention to what he was ordering.
2) Dell's website should be more user-friendly.

There is no conflict with those two statements, and both can be simultaneously true. If you lean towards one or the other then that's a kind of Rorschach test.
posted by zardoz at 1:40 PM on April 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

Civ 6 isn't terrible on a Nintendo Switch. That's how I've been playing it. The game itself is significantly more expensive (especially with the expansions) on the Switch but the console is much cheaper than a PC and being able to play on the bus is quite nice.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:45 PM on April 29, 2021

"Just order a Mac:" generally a good option, if 1) the software you need works on Mac, 2) you can afford the Apple Tax, and 3) (something that Mac People never consider) you can actually stand to work with MacOS's weird-ass UI. (Don't @ me, Mac People. If the UI works for you, more power to you. It emphatically does not work for me, but this rant is not my MacOS UI Is Bad And Predicated On Bad, Outdated Design Principles rant.)

Also, I've had some very, ah, entertaining problems with Macs doing things like refusing to drive monitors at their native resolution, but only when used in portrait mode. Macs Just Work until they suddenly Definitely Don't Work and you will never Make Them Work because you had the audacity to let them connect to a piece of non-Apple electronics or decided to do something that Apple did not think you should want to do.

"Just buy a pre-built PC:" Unfortunately, the offerings on the PC side are more or less a nightmarish sea of garbage, where even if you manage to find a reliable, not-too-expensive pre-built machine, it probably comes with a small raft of difficult-or-impossible-to-remove crapware. Relevant to the story at hand, this is usually true even for the big, reputable brands like Dell or Lenovo, unless you go to their business-user-oriented section, where suddenly you need to make about 90 choices about what to put into your computer, and heaven help you if you don't know exactly what you are doing, because about 87 of those choices should be "just stick with the default" and the other 3 will be "oh god, no, the default is only good enough for people who are forced to check email and make not-too-elaborate spreadsheets in an office somewhere," and you, as a person who just wants to Get Things Done, have no idea which is which.

"Just build your own, it's so easy:" I've been building my own since the 90s. I'm a professional software engineer. I work at a low enough level that I actually understand -- probably better than most people who put PCs together -- more or less how all of the stupid specs interact, and what specs are actually useful to me. I know how to use tools like PCPartPicker to automatically check compatibility. I'm rich enough that I don't need to worry if I overspend $100, as long as the thing actually works. It still takes f'ing hours to figure out what to buy, then more hours to actually assemble the damn thing. If I opened up PCPartPicker cold, on a budget? "OK, on my 27th iteration I've figured out which processor and M.2 SSD I think I want, which gives me a pile of motherboards, and I've managed to select a motherboard that will work for me (I hope) and now... how the f@#$ am I supposed to know whether it's worth $50 to drop RAM CAS latency from 16 to 14?"

Then comes the actual assembly. You know what happened the last time I built my own computer? I went through 3 motherboards before (re)learning that newer motherboards have a second power connector, and the reason I was getting a single LED but no other signs of life from the motherboards was because I only plugged in the first power connector. Even when things go smoothly, it's 2-3 hours of my life where I'd really prefer to be doing something else, rather than dicking around with thermal paste and carefully-but-forcefully inserting hundreds of dollars of electronics into other hundreds of dollars of electronics.

In summary, buying a computer is basically just a frustrating experience no matter what you do, and no matter what your skill level is.
posted by reventlov at 1:46 PM on April 29, 2021 [13 favorites]

All of yous saying "just buy a mac" - have you seen what they cost these days? The literal cheapest possible mac is seven hundred pounds. Seven hundred! The cheapest iMac is £1250. A decent usable Acer is less than half that.

If you're made of money, sure, get a mac. If not, there's plenty of reasonable, functional options for prebuilts that aren't bespoke business account machines that will also Just Work, don't require you to configure anything, and have sensible defaults.
posted by Dysk at 1:52 PM on April 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

(And like, I've never bought a prebuilt. When I've been able, financially, I've built my own. I've owned several hand me down ex (home) office PCs though. They absolutely do Just Work.)
posted by Dysk at 1:55 PM on April 29, 2021

Gaming laptops often run on maximum performance only if you power it directly from the nearest substation they're on mains, and they usually have comparatively humongous power bricks.

Thunderbolt 3 is a great way to power a MacBook Pro through an external display and there's plenty of juice to drive its discrete GPU for gaming after work. Since the lockdown started, in fact, I think I've plugged in the laptop's brick only two or three times, when I've had need to unhook the MBP from its displays.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:58 PM on April 29, 2021

(Of course none of this solves the problem of not knowing what parts you need in the computer to start with.)

Well, you start with the thingamajig, several doodads, and a widget. Or two. Maybe even three, it depends. Then of course the whatchamacallit and that doohickey thing.

And a box to put it all in.

Be sure to get a box that can hold it all and has pretty blinken lites. Because at least when after you've put all the other things in and it doesn't even beep, you still have the pretty blinken lites to look at.
posted by Stoneshop at 2:11 PM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I always have a hollow laugh when people recommend just buying an Apple product that just work because the only time I've been tempted to track down the graves¹ of the people responsible for a piece of hardware and spit on them was with an Apple product. Even if atypical it was still disappointing. And I used to provide support professionally so I've seen some shit.

"Oh I know let's employ someone that costs at least $80K pa and then skimp on the hardware so they spend most of that time waiting for mechanical rust to fly around a spindle."

Literally the worst example of penny wise, pound foolish I could ever think of in business.

Well there are lots of people sitting at computers all day [or even part of the day] who aren't pulling down $80k. All the receptionists and assistants and janitors making $10 an hour. Nominally having that cheap low capabilities hardware available lets you service them without using 10 year old equipment which is usually what otherwise happens IME.

Also there are still PCs around as interfaces to/controls of specialized hardware. Eg: a PC in a mechanical room that runs/interfaces a DDC. That sort of machine might only get an hour or two a year of actual interaction.

[1] graves because surely other user as already strangled them.
posted by Mitheral at 2:14 PM on April 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

Well there are lots of people sitting at computers all day [or even part of the day] who aren't pulling down $80k. All the receptionists and assistants and janitors making $10 an hour.

They're not sitting in front of xeon-w workstations like in the tweet-thread.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:01 PM on April 29, 2021

I was with him and then he starts talking M.2 slots and other specific terms and I just find it hard to believe he forgot to select SSD when configuring it.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 3:01 PM on April 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

(And like, I've never bought a prebuilt. When I've been able, financially, I've built my own. I've owned several hand me down ex (home) office PCs though. They absolutely do Just Work.)

There are options that Just Work, but you have to know what you are doing to find those options in the first place. And if you try asking other people what you should do, you end up with... pretty much this thread: a bunch of people saying "just buy a Mac" and a bunch of other people saying "build your own, it's so easy," plus about 20 conflicting recommendations for various types of pre-builts, most of which probably come from people who have no idea what you actually need for your specific uses, plus, maybe, if you're very lucky, one person, nearly drowned in the noise, who gives actual good advice that is relevant to you.
posted by reventlov at 3:02 PM on April 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

I was with him and then he starts talking M.2 slots and other specific terms and I just find it hard to believe he forgot to select SSD when configuring it.

Seems like a weird con, then.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:15 PM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Don't @ me, Mac People. If the UI works for you, more power to you. It emphatically does not work for me, but this rant is not my MacOS UI Is Bad And Predicated On Bad, Outdated Design Principles rant.

Why don't you just use the command line?
posted by mr_roboto at 3:56 PM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

The literal cheapest possible mac is seven hundred pounds. Seven hundred! The cheapest iMac is £1250.

Why the hell are they so expensive over there? It would be hundreds of pounds cheaper to have someone buy it for you in the US and ship it.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:00 PM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

There are options that Just Work, but you have to know what you are doing to find those options in the first place.

Or you go to their consumer division, not their business one. That's it, that's the whole trick!

Alternatively, go to an actual shop. Curry's (ubiquitous UK retailer of all things electrical) had a very extensive selection of perfectly reasonable, perfectly reasonably priced PCs last I was in there.
posted by Dysk at 4:00 PM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

The fact that I've never actually bought one new doesn't mean I haven't window-shopped or looked at speccing one out on a bunch of vendors' websites at various times over the years. I don't want to be using decade-old secondhand SFF office boxes, it's what I have been able to afford.
posted by Dysk at 4:04 PM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I know a fair amount about computers, I used to do repairs for a living decades ago (think dawn of the 386 era), so while I'm not up with the latest bits (that's a dad-joke compupun) I have the right screwdrivers and anti-static cords to futz around and install extra fans and stuff. The last PC I bought I chose all the bits which shaved a few hundred off the in-store builds, ran my build past the guy at the store, and still managed to get a motherboard that didn't support the RAM I chose at its full capacity - not a showstopper, but it still rankles. Also, it needed more fans.

(I paid an extra 80 bucks for the store to build the actually PC because 1) It's a good store who didn't grump when I returned two drives for making clunking noises that reverbed in my case, 2) cord handling is an dark art and also 3) I am a delicate flower and some of those edges are hella sharp).
posted by Sparx at 4:41 PM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I don't know but based on what you described earlier in the thread I'd speculate it could be a power supply problem. Which is harder to address with a laptop than a desktop I think. Basically, your kitted-out components pull lots of power, and in total it could be more power than your laptop can comfortably supply. If your computer is trying to pull more power than its supply can provide, the voltage can start to fluctuate, which will cause hard crashes under high-load conditions. That sounds a bit like what you described which is what makes me think it's a possibility.

Ha, I’m so glad I posted that bitchy comment because I think this must be absolutely right. To demonstrate the level of knowledge I’m working with here, I had never thought to consider that power supply might be a variable in how well computers work at all!

I should point out that my current, five-year-old laptop is NOT a gaming laptop, thus the problems. Lately, when I try to run Civ and have the audacity to have Chrome open at the same time, Task Manager will glow an angry red and tell me I’m using 100% of various things.
posted by showbiz_liz at 5:57 PM on April 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

Lately, when I try to run Civ and have the audacity to have Chrome open at the same time, Task Manager will glow an angry red and tell me I’m using 100% of various things.

The web these days is awful. As Fabien Sanglard says:
“The crucial question about a computer used to be "But can it run DOOM?". Later it became "But can it run Crysis?". These day it is "But can it run nytimes.com?". To which I am happy to report I was able to browse newspaper websites without burning myself.”

Quote taken from an article where Fabien upgrades from a MacBook Air to a Lenovo Thinkpad.
posted by Monochrome at 8:41 PM on April 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

The crucial question about a computer used to be "But can it run DOOM?"

Will this do Mine Sweeper?
posted by flabdablet at 9:23 PM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

when I try to run Civ and have the audacity to have Chrome open at the same time, Task Manager will glow an angry red and tell me I’m using 100% of various things

Using 100% of various things shouldn't be a huge problem. If it is - for example, if the laptop starts to lock up soon after, or restart or just shut down - the most common cause is a mat of dust and lint built up on the upstream side of the internal cooling fins, right where the internal fan is trying to shove air through them.

The easiest fix for this is to find the place where warm air comes out of the machine and blow into it very hard. Use a compressed air handpiece at a local garage if your lungs aren't up to it. You'll know it's worked if it makes a big phoof of dust come out through what's normally the air intake and the fan speed drops dramatically.

This method will not work if the laptop has spent much of its working life in an environment where people smoke, because in that case the dust plug will be held together and glued to the heatsink fins with tar.
posted by flabdablet at 9:32 PM on April 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

Showbiz_liz: Laptops, especially the cheaper ones, have only two replaceable parts that affect performance: memory and the disk. If Task Manager reports that it's using
- 100% of processor? there's nothing you can do as fitting a faster one, if at all possible, will only bring a marginal improvement and is very rarely worth the effort.
- 100% of memory? Check if that model can hold more memory than what's currently fitted. Sites like crucial.com tend to list what kind of memory you would need and the maximum that can be installed. If, as an example, Civ6 wants to use 3GB of memory, Chrome also wants 3GB, and there's only 4GB installed those extra 2GB have to be claimed from the swapfile on disk, and every time each of those programs need to access a bit of data that it expects to be in memory but has been moved to the swapfile, it has to be reloaded from disk and some other part has to be moved out. This is comparatively slow, even with an SSD. Installing an extra 4GB would eliminate this swapping.
- 100% of disk I/O: (note, this is not disk space; that would cause "Disk full, can't save" type messages). The system is waiting for the disk to respond to a request for reading or writing data, including the swapfile mentioned above. An SSD is generally fast enough that such a 100% peak would be very brief (not even one second, if it'd occur at all) unless it's developing hardware problems. Conventional ("spinning rust") disks can easily hold up a system for several seconds, even more so if it's close to full and/or developing problems. Whether replacing a conventional harddisk with an SSD is worth the effort depends on the state, and age, of the laptop itself.

Power is rarely a problem with laptops. Unlike a desktop where one can find graphics cards and CPUs whose power draw can range from a small lightbulb to a serious space heater, a laptop's power draw is known the moment the technical design is finished and the bits that convert the battery voltage to what the processor and the other parts need are rated to supply that (with a bit of headroom). As people simply can't fit a beefier graphics card or processor, those power converters don't need to be designed to account for that, nor can they be overloaded (unless it's a shoddy design and it's been built with minimal margins). One thing that can happen though is what flabdablet mentions: degraded cooling. Because it's not only the processor that gets hot, the power converter components do so too, and this can lead to a flaky system. They tend not to be actively cooled, but more heat from the processor will spread to other components including the power converters.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:37 AM on April 30, 2021 [6 favorites]

"But can it run nytimes.com?".

My usual reaction to this is noscript and ublock origin*, but NYtimes doesn't even pull in eleventy billion bits and pieces from all over the web, just its own two sites (nytimes.com and nyt.com) and still manages to peg a 2GHz quad core I7.

* which I have active by default, only disabling things piece by piece until a site works well enough or I get fed up with that malarkey and move elsewhere.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:10 AM on April 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

I sometimes try to make obsolete laptops into usable machines, for fun. What can I say, I'm easily amused. I do this by installing a light Linux distro on them and then I look whether they can be used for not-too-demanding day to day tasks. (Not that anyone wants them.)
For example, they need to be able to run a word processor; if they can't manage Libre Office, the next stop is AbiWord, which is in itself quite usable. And so on.

But the most important benchmark is: can they run an up-to-date browser?
And in order to try that out, I see whether the browser can meaningfully render the Ikea homepage and not go belly up, flailing about like an overturned turtle. It's just a website, but it loads Javascript from a ton of sources if you let it. It has all kinds of interactivity and animation that have a huge memory footprint. All for the sake of selling us more stuff.

The Web is just so heavy these days.
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:27 AM on April 30, 2021 [10 favorites]

fedward: A vendor like Dell doesn't even want to display service parts for a computer that didn't ship with those components in the first place (identified by the Service Tag).

At least IBM's Lenovo's Thinkpad line is different in that respect. They (still) offer Hardware Maintenance Manuals (HMM) for all current and a lot of recent machines, and older HMMs are often archived at sites like thinkwiki.org.

With the model number ("X201s") and the model tag ("5143-22x") you can find even the part number for the last itty-bitty screw that would hold an optional WWAN card in place. If that particular card model needs one, that is. I'm not sure you can order that screw through Lenovo, but if you can they would likely charge you $14 and send it in an antistatic bag, but the next step I usually take is to go to eBay and see what comes up searching for that number. Sometimes you need to hit AliExpress, but that is more fraught with error due to the relentless, erm, flexibility with which some sellers approach the concept "compatible".
posted by Stoneshop at 1:59 AM on April 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

I'm not sure if it's still the case, but you used to be able to do a similar lookup to what Dell has on their website. It used to be handy for figuring out which keyboard your particular unit shipped with since there were a couple of different options they'd use. They also had a site where you could order any FRU you wanted, though the price was often higher than what you'd find on eBay by searching the FRU number. The cooler I needed for my out of warranty T60p was much cheaper direct, but WiFi cards, WWAN cards, and other stuff that was more common was cheaper on eBay.

It's been a long time since I had to deal with their support, but back when I did their Thinkpad people were great for what I needed.

I had a hard drive fail on me late one afternoon and rather than insist I send the whole laptop in or take it to a service center, they were fine just shipping me a new drive when I said I was comfortable swapping it myself. They gave me a number to call when I was done to have the old one picked up and told me to expect the new one the next day.

I got the new one early the next morning and took about an hour to install, image, and stress test the new disk. Like many laptops, the physical replacement was a breeze since it was designed with serviceability in mind. One screw to expose the disk and four to hold it in its tray. No fiddly connectors or anything of the sort.

Anyway, I get it done, call the number they gave me, and take a moment of repose. As I'm dropping the old drive in the box, there is a knock at the door. Less than half an hour had passed before someone was there to collect it. No return label needed, just a guy wanting the box I'd gotten the day before.

Anyway, the point is that I spent less time dealing with it than I would have getting it fixed while I waited at a walk in repair facility and didn't even have to leave the house. Just 10 minutes on the phone and less than an hour's work.

To be fair, that was back when Lenovo still had all the old IBM people and processes in place. I would be unsurprised if the experience is much less delightful today. At the very least, DHL wouldn't be at my door picking up a box before I'd had a chance to pack it!
posted by wierdo at 3:34 AM on April 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

Corporate Dell and HP both use the model that they have to service their own equipment, not you, the customer. OTOH Dell's service is pretty shit, while, at least for my employers, HP is pretty responsive. Lenovo's model is more that they will help you do the servicing yourself if that's what you want. They're also about HP level in terms of doing service for you. Lenovo is also the best at servicing older models (like more than 3 years old) of the three.

On the upfront cost side, Dell is often 10% cheaper than the other two. For stuff that needs higher reliability on the desktop we never look at dells anymore. For labs, we're almost entirely HP, and that works really well for us. But I spec those out in bulk from either HP or a specialist reseller who does the custom assembly for us, including putting on a corporate image. For laptops and docks, almost entirely Lenovo, which our IT department images themselves.

Pretty much none of this is relevant to someone trying to buy a system for home or a small business, unless they do what the guy on the twitters did and stumble into the wrong place. But fit for purpose, buying 100s at a time for cubical desks, they tend to work pretty well and are decently cost-effective.
posted by bonehead at 6:50 AM on April 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think that the real test should be, can it run PC Building Simulator? Because, if not...
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:36 PM on April 30, 2021