[TriLUG] pitching Ubuntu vs Vista

[Matthew Pusateri]

On May 12, 2008, at 10:14 AM, Tim Jowers wrote:

> This company has thousands of DELL GX620, and Latitude D600, and  
> D620 and
> the disks fail all of the time. Sure, these computers are 4 years  
> old or so
> but my point is the hardware fails after a while so a warranty might  
> not be
> a bad idea. Not that I'd buy one personally or even professionaly  
> because I
> can swap drive more easily than mess with support and drives are  
> cheap now;
> but companies like this have a formal process even if it is a bad
> investment.
> BTW, by all of the time I mean just about everyone on the team has  
> had disks
> fails and some have had multiple failures.. In the 14 months I've  
> worked
> here I've had one laptop disk fail and one desktop disk. Oddly the  
> only
> failures I ever had on my home systems were due to bad mode pages I  
> sent to
> SCSI disks and hooking cable up backwards back int eh rally old  
> days. I even
> have a 12 year old NCR 386 laptop which still works! Well, I did  
> have some
> disk failures in some SCA disks but they were carried on a plane by  
> someone
> else without proper packaging.
>
> Tim


Having a about 20 Dell D610, D620 laptops at my last job, I had to  
have the motherboards replaced on 5 or 6 due to failed ethernet ports  
and more commonly failed AC power ports.  The Dell warranty is worth  
it given the high rate of port failures on motherboards.  Incidentally  
the the power supply connector on the motherboard broke on my $wife's  
HP laptop as well.


Matt P.