Dell or HP???

[paulyoung666]

Originally Posted by Pem

For Desktops I would always choose HP - I have had nothing but problems with Dell Desktops (I buy hundreds of PC's per year). However, for Laptops I would say Dell are better.

That said - for heavy business use I would personally not touch AMD processors.

so it looks as though it is going to be a personal preference issue then

[Xaccers]

Originally Posted by Defiant

I prefer AMD but Pentiums are better for business. That's why there so widely used in them

Nah, intel is more widely used because managers are dumb and believe the hype


We used to use Dell PC's and lappies in DERA, have £1milli on of them go through in one month alone, the DOA rate was so low we only tested ones we took to remote sites.

[andygrif]

My personal preference would be Dell on my two experiences:

Personal computers - I'm on my third Dell desktop now - I guess you could call me a serial upgrader. The new one is the best I've had yet (and 8300) and is a superb piece of architecture. The cases are on little pistons, making case access simple. Everything inside is snap-in, rather than using those nasty little screws, and the layout is superbly thought out, easy access to every component.

Professionally, I'm not an IT person, but I recently specified a new gigabit based professional audio editing system for my department with 4tb of storage.

We went for the big Dell Precision workstations (same case as the 8300) but the build quality is far superior (even though the 8300s are superb). Installed about 2 months ago, and not a single hitch along the way or since.

Someone mentioned that the HP use proprietary motherboards, well so do Dell, but they are more like tweaked Intel ones than custom made - but it's worth bearing in mind.

Also, it's definitely worth going back to your account manager at Dell and sending him the quote from Insight - they may surprise you. We got a great deals on our 20 workstations, whilst they only tweaked the cost downwards slightly, they did upgrade all the processors, additional memory and hard disks plus upgraded the tft screens to 18" UltraSharp ones.

Worth a try!

[KingPhoenix]

Well....... Dell it was.... they offered another 3% discount (meant nothing really, i think i had already decided to have dell boxes) but they will be here on Friday

Thanks for all the advice etc..

KP

[gazzae]

Originally Posted by Richard M

As much as hate Dell, I'd still go with them - if only because of the motherboard thing stated above.
AMD are (imo) the better CPUs though.

Dell do the thing with motherboards as well.

A friend of mine brought one on-line a few months ago, I had an old graphics card I was going to put on for him, opened it up - no AGP port!

[paulyoung666]

Originally Posted by KingPhoenix

Well....... Dell it was.... they offered another 3% discount (meant nothing really, i think i had already decided to have dell boxes) but they will be here on Friday

Thanks for all the advice etc..

KP

bit late now , but , where i work the decision to go for dell was volume discount

[Shaun]

Originally Posted by gazzae

Dell do the thing with motherboards as well.

A friend of mine brought one on-line a few months ago, I had an old graphics card I was going to put on for him, opened it up - no AGP port!

I think if you buy one of their cheaper models with on-board graphics then they don't have an AGP pot, both of mine do, and the build quality is excellent. Shame the (Indian) customer service can let them down some times

[GeoffW]

When I looked after my companies PCs I went with Dell, largely as they bundled software and had better price/performance. However I was far from happy with the reliability, we had numerous HD and monitor failures, within 4 years 70% of monitors had blown up. The notebooks, which admittedly had a tough time, lasted well except for the HD.

Customer service for anything in computers is a hiding to nothing, Dell may be better than the rest but don't set your expectations too high and you wont be disappointed.

I lost faith with them after buying 3 notebooks and debating about wifi, only to find the month after I placed my order a new model arrived with wfi inbuilt and cheaper. Probably my fault for not asking, but that really ****ed me off. It's symptomatic of Dells bad approach to business, they are more geared to the latest and greatest so older parts are not around as long.

My experience with HP/Compaq has been great, good spec, build and low price. HP Customer service is much better but geared more toward medium to larger companies, this is where Dell struggle to compete with service.

My choice today would be HP, but if you're a small company it probably doesn't really matter!