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Dell 2001FP.

That is almost half of the price you said and a VERY awesome monitor. I work at a healthcare facility and several of our physicians have this monitor and it is awesome. Great response time as well. Very crisp.

Chris

Secondly, EM64T processors are expensive, server-oriented Xeons.

It wouldn't make much sense to compared them with cheap desktop Athlon64s.

It would make perfect sense to compare socket 939 Athlon64s to EM64T Pentium 4s on 925X chipset, but I don't think EM64T P4s are easy to get without purchasing a whole workstation (oddly, boxed EM64T P4s are available in Japan). Can't Anandtech mooch a CPU from Intel for review purposes?

It does, when you buy from Dell Canada. Dimension 2400 $500 CDN with monitor. You cannot hope to compete with the OEMs at this price point.

Not quite the 19" display I'd like for my computer at home, but definitely a step in the right direction.

The smart people don't have to pay the msft tax.

see : http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/compare.a spx/desktops_n?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd

One thing to note, however, is that you should REALLY get the $20 Dell floppy add on. They don't come with a standard floppy mount or faceplate, and I had to fabricate 20 ugly metal kluges while simultaneously defacing my pricewatch special FDD's.

-theGreater nSeries Fan.

This strikes me as one of those neat solutions that sadly won't find a market.

A few years ago, when a new business class PC would run the better part of two thousand bucks, this would make sense. In today's corporate setting a new PC with Windows licence wouldn't cost significantly more than than the PC Reviver.

If your existing stock of PCs are old enough that this is the only way of making them useful, what other hardware failures are looming?

First of all, while Dell doesn't advertise who makes their printers, it's also not a big secret. Furthermore, Lexmark is not the only printer manufacturer they partner with.

Of course, it's also just entirely possible that you'll get someone on the phone who just doesn't know who makes the printers. The internal documentation available to sales and most tech support reps doesn't call this information out, it's not relevant to what they do.

As for legacy drivers. Why should Dell be obligated to provide Driver support for Operating Systems they don't sell and haven't sold for years? Dell never sold printers at the same time it sold Windows 98. Most people do not "just" buy a Dell Printer, they buy it with a system purchase.

Lastly, the support information for the printer and basic information available on the website clearly states which Operating Systems the printer can use. Note further down the page on the right under Compatibility .. where is says, Compatible only with Windows 2000 and Windows XP. http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/compare.a spx/allinone?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd

The pros were Debian's stability and backports for security.

The cons were mostly that most proprietary hardware vendors (i.e., Dell and a few others) at least semi-officially support Redhat and no other distro really. Matt Domsch's linux page (and later linux.dell.com) were helpful for those of us struggling to figure out how to get Openmanage working to do something seemingly simple like snmp monitor the dell hardware.

Alien also was key, for those who don't know, alien can convert .rpms to .debs, though not always perfectly, since most proprietary vendors make their rpms with all sorts of unnecessary dependencies on Redhat where something more generic could have been used as far as file locations and installation scripts.

We had another 3rd party vendor who I won't name that sells a PCI card with "Linux support", though it really means Redhat. To use it required patching Apache, Openssl, and mod_ssl. We had some problems getting it all to work, but since it was only officially supported on Redhat, I had to setup a Redhat box and replicate our problems on there. Lots of extra work, but it's all working in the end.

I guess the summary is that debian in a commercial environment is very feasible, especially from a maintenance (apt and apt-proxy rocks!) and a security point of view (not a lot of extra crap installed and running). The downside can be lack of support for non-Redhat style installs. A few years ago, we would have been lucky to have any Linux support at all!

Serial and (as I have just discovered) parallel ports are available as usb accessories.

USB to Serial

USB to Parallel

I guess with 6 GB RAM each they shouldn't have to do much (or ANY, if I was running this) swapping, and if the jobs are tweaked to not use the hard drives too intensively, they might be OK. If what you do uses the hard drives for much, they are sh*t, to put it mildly. If you could plug these into the blades, they's be very useful, quick machines. But you can't yet.

The really crap thing is, if you do want SCSI drives in the IBM blades, you connect a module ot the side of the blade which gives you a couple of proper SCSI drive bays. Which halves the number of blades-per-bladecenter to 7.

Given the bladecenter is 7U tall, you'd be better off with 7 1U servers with SCSI bays already in and better NIC options. The internal networking of the bladecenter is awful for everything but the simplest low-requirement setups - it's hideously expensive to give each blade a couple of gigabit connections.

Even these cheap little things are 1U, take 2 U320 SCSI drives, and have dual Gigabit connections built-in.

And I *still* can't get USB dongles to work with thes fscking blades, grumble grumble.

Having said all that, when can I play on this thing? My Folding@Home could do with a bit of a boost, and with Hyperthreading I could have 2016 units running simultaneously.... although it might get a little warm behind the racks, 1008 2.8 GHz Xeons pump out a good bit of heat!

I have a Dell i8600 and I did have problems with SP2. When I installed the last public beta of SP2 before it went gold, whenever I pulled the AC cord out while Windows was running, I'd get a STOP error with gv3.sys. Searching on those same Dell forums, I found out I had to update my CPU driver. My original driver was dated sometime in 2002, but a nice and quick upgrade over the net from Microsoft gave me a April 2004 driver that has done away with the STOP errors.

On another note, I don't have any performance problems with SP2. It runs pretty much the same as with just SP1. Then again, I hear lots of stories about Dell computers and I don't give them any weight because I've never experienced any. The forums are interesting to wander through, complete lists of drivers for machines, nothing but a positive experience.

As an OEM that sells systems bundled with XP, Dell, I believe, is obligated to support systems whose users apply service packs to the OEM-installed OS. There was some flak about this some time ago when some OEMs simply referred their customers to Microsoft, and I believe that they were reminded that they picked up this obligation as one consequence of their OEM arrangement. This support site page gives the particulars for Dell. In my experience, Dell acts like any other Windows sysadm: they wait until their own internal testing is done before they add it to the list of supported service packs, so that they can simultaneously publish a list of any issues (such as required driver updates). Until then, you take your chances (which have been minimal for me, though I tend to stay in the Latitude line, even for home systems) and rely on the forums. My reading is that Dell isn't done with its testing, and the particular spokesperson is only half right: not supported until their testing is complete and it appears on the above page.

If you still use Roxio Easy CD Creator 5.x, you will not get to use DirectCD for UDF Packet writing to save directly to CD after SP2 is installed. This program comes with every new Dell Optiplex we bought this year. These Computers are supposed to be Supported with SP2. But 2 calls into Dell T.S. resulted in a "Sorry, too bad" response. They recommend Windows native CD burning, but that ain't UDF.
(We have a need to make saving to CD as simple as a floppy for some elderly folks.)
This one isn't listed on Microsoft's list of SP2 incompatible programs.
Nor is anything mentioned on Roxio's site except people complaining. Roxio is up to version 7 now so you know they say to upgrade, but Dell still ships old v.5 out with new PCs. Go figure

I did XP in extreme C++ for about a year (by extreme C++, I mean boostified, Alexandrescu'd C++). We used CppUnit for our test framework.

I'm not especially satisfied with the currently available C++ unit testing frameworks. CppUnit and Boost's both have trade-offs. I suspect they'll both get better, though.

The Ant-Contrib project's cc task works pretty well, in my limited experience. I was playing around with it just this weekend. I've yet to set up a tinderbox build process, but I don't see why this wouldn't be easy with either Cruise Control or good ol' cron.

In my mind, the two biggest hurdles with doing XP in C++ are build speed and developer prejudice. You can tackle build speed with a combination of ccache, distcc, good programming principles, and cash. Tackling developer prejudice is harder. A lot of C++ programmers like to write low-level, unsafe, old school C++ code. Modern C++ mostly lets you discard unsafe coding practices without sacrificing efficiency. Whether you can convince an old C++ programmer of this is another matter; it depends on the person. I've had decent success taking Java programmers and teaching them modern C++ via pair programming.

Using Boost helps, indirectly. You write safer code, which gives you a faster development cycle. All in all, I think the basic tools are there. It might be a little harder to get fancy lava lamp integration going with C++, but there's no reason why you can't have a good build process. It's just that a lot of C++ projects haven't evolved (I think this is due, in part, to the fact that the C++ community is late to the internet; a lot of C++ programmers just don't know what's, out there.

cheers,

Jon

Granted the Itanium is still "alphaware" and who knows when it will have a full release

What are you talking about? Itaniums have been shipping since May/June 2001, and the Itanium II came out July-August 2002. You can buy one today. So it's pretty well known what's in Itanium and that it's faster for floating point than AMD64 (though not more cost effective, except for certain very high-end computing loads).

Dell's "top of the line" in their compact desktop range (the Dimension 4600 C) also maxes out at 2 gigs of RAM.

I've never owned a computer with more than a gig of RAM (sorry to say), and I'm a pro. I think it's safe to say that a 2 gig limit is appropriate for a home box.

Nope, it's the disk. For Dell D600 trouble, see here, here and here.

Nope, it's the disk. For Dell D600 trouble, see here, here and here.

Do you notice anything in common?

Perhaps Microsoft is making some deals under the table to prevent Linux from getting into the laptop market.

the point is not the LG CD_ROM user group, which I doubt ever existed, but the fact that previous installations of Mandrake kinda made the LG CD_ROMs go up in smoke

$36.95. (Dell 40/80GB DLT tape)

How many tapes are necessary to start beating the price of the equivalent number of 80GB hard drives?

At that price, 1.

This is not a troll: What happens when you unplug the camera, plug in a USB key, and then plug the camera in again? Isn't the camera now /dev/sdb? And the usb key is now linked to /dev/camera? Or has there been work done to stop this?

Yup, try devlabel. As used in RHEL (see RH's documentation). Works for me, and I'm surprised it isn't more widely known.

Actually, it's less than one second. A colleague of mine locked his Dell D600 with a Kensington. A couple of hours later, he goes home and swoops the laptop off the table without thinking about the lock. A tiny edge broke off and the lock was there lying on the table, useless.

Dell already went into the gaming laptop business with their Inspiron XPS system. It's a bit pricy, so I bought myself a Inspiron 9100 (much the same realy, except for the P4EE). There's an excellent review here.

Well, the case is nothing new. At work I use their Precision 670 which looks exactly like the Dimension XPS from the article. Guess they just tweaked its looks using the blue color and some fancy lights, eh?

See for yourselves here

Sorry about the Swedish HREF, but the english version meant to much clicking and I'm tired. Though the images should be understandable for you foreigners out there.

9 times out of 10 this is the best deal on desktops and laptops anywhere, especially when you consider the quality of what you're getting (I'm sorry, but Dell is better than most of these fly-by-nite operations by a long shot). The inventory changes almost daily, so if they don't have what you want, try again the next day.

That being said, I *have* had a Dell refurbished part fail on me, four months after purchase. Of course I thought "well, you can't get something for nothing..". However, after a quick chat with customer service they had a replacement on my doorstep two days later, with a RMA and a box for the old part. I'm so happy about this that I'm writing this post.

Also, Anandtech just posted a new roadmap with some info on upcoming 64-bit Pentium 4 CPU/chipsets for the desktop. The Intel 925XE chipset (with 1066MHz FSB) will ship in October along with 64-bit Pentium 4 "F" processors. "F" supposedly means it's a 64-bit Prescott.

The Dell Inspirion 8000 series can use 2 batteries with an optical drive. A lot of laptops with modular bays will take an extra battery, but you usually lose your CD-ROM.

Yay - now it will be easy for guys like me (lazy people who don't feel like assembling machines by hand anymore) to get an x86-64 box from Dell:

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/compare.a spx/precn?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd

Or should I say 'Intel® Extended Memory 64 Technology' (whatever guys - everyone knows that it is just AMDs tech)

"Too bad most of the rest of the laptop-buying audience is too dense to look past the bling of clock speed numbers."

Uh. It's hard to look past the bling of not enough money.

The "Centrino" notebooks are significantly more expensive than the P4 ones.

Even if the specs aren't the same, it's hard to buy a Centrino notebook that's cheaper. They're generally marketed as a more expensive range.

Dell makes a really nice rack-mounted hardware raid system. We are using these at my work, and they are pretty slick. You get redundent power supplies, hot swappable drives, all fast SCSI, with completely configurable raid levels. You can choose to split the drives to be on two distinct raid arrays, or put everything on the same array. The unit will beep and even email you when one of the drives fails. With the tech support from Dell, when this happens they have sent us a replacement drive within 24 hours. We keep a spare drive around as well, and you just pop out the old one, pop in the new one, and it rebuilds everything with no downtime. I'm sure it's not super cheap, but if you really need a good raid system this would be what I would recommend. I don't know if this will work, but here is a link to their small business storage solutions page. -FC

Regarding Dell Latitude and Inspiron laptop lines: yes many of the specs and features are very similar or exactly the same, but one of the biggest reasons businesses go with the Latitudes is the "long life cycles" vs. the Inspiron's "latest and greatest technology" (as Dell puts it). The Inspiron models come and go, but the Latitudes stick around much longer. http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.as px/products/needhelp/en/compare_notebooks?c=us&cs= 04&l=en&s=bsd&~lt=popup&~tab=3

When my business buys a batch of laptops this year and another batch next year, as an admin I sure don't want to have to maintain two seperate hard drive images and sets of drivers (which happened to us with the Inspiron 4100/4150, then again with the Inspiron 8500/8600). As a home user I don't care about any thing other than my single model, so only the hardware specs matter.

Other things like docking station support and Windows 2000/NT support are the same: marketing driven descisions.

Also the Latitude models are supposed to be able to take more physical abuse than their Inspiron cousins. I'm still waiting to pull one apart to see for my self.

As a number of others have said, it isn't always just about the hardware you have in hand.

Compare:
SMC TigerSwitch 8624T
Dell PowerConnect 5224
NetGear GSM7324
DLink DGS-3324SR
Well, that's all of them, except for Linksys, which is just rebranded Cisco equipment.
And of course, they all use COMPLETELY DIFFERENT firmware. Lovely.

Their website is also a joke. Have you tried logging into http://support.dell.com/ ? 500 errors constantly/randomly.

Just look at their Reseller Rating.. it's a 3.39 out of 10. That's AWFUL.

Check out my horror story posted on Dell's forums, about my Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop. I love the replies.. "it's your own fault." Riight.

This limited warranty does not cover:

* Software, including the operating system and software added to the Dell-branded hardware products through our factory-integration system, third-party software, or the reloading of software
* Non-Dell branded and Solution Provider Direct products and accessories
* Problems that result from:
External causes such as accident, abuse, misuse, or problems with electrical power
Servicing not authorized by Dell
Usage that is not in accordance with product instructions
Failure to follow the product instructions or failure to perform preventive maintenance
[b]Problems caused by using accessories, parts, or components not supplied by Dell[/b]
* Products with missing or altered Service Tags or serial numbers
* Products for which Dell has not received payment

Since neither the USB dongle or the pci card would be supplied by dell your warranty would be not different after opening up the case.

Or you could buy a , standalone pc card from dell:

Not to mention that if I were a computer educator, the first week of class would involved putting together a few pc's using bulk-purchased motherboards, cases, drives and memory; at a ratio of 5 students per PC, that's maybe $50 per student, likely less; in 5 years you have a PC for each student (second week would be installing Linux). You doubt a high-schooler could do this? And maybe learn a bit more than he would at a Mac screen?

How about you provide the links this time around? I already did my part. In fact, before I even posted the second time I did exactly what you suggested - went to the mediam & large business section of dell's website and checked out the optiplex, dimension and precision lines, none of them listed "no operating system" as an option and even spot-checking the customize section for 4 different models "no OS" was never an option.

Here's another great thread on the dell website about usb HDTV ready TV cards for dell laptops. It's a very long thread. Make sure to go to the rest of the discussion on later pages.

And here is a $2600 Dell laptop. What's your point?

Buy the machine that's right for you. The one that was right for me was the $1399 12" Powerbook with Superdrive I'm having delivered tomorrow.

You can have your Dells. Me? I'm tired of screwing with Windows.

Obviously, you probably think a Mac, SGI, or the ever popular for OpenGL pSeries is cheap as well, given the price bracket of the cards to run this beast, $300-400+. With the realistic low end at the 7500/Mobility FGL 7800(The only chip solely in a non Apoo or jobstealing laptop)- and the highend (read: always out of reach of mere mortals due to the oligopoly created by the buyouts) is around the x800.

But you arent forced to do X, buy X or involve yourself with X

Well, that doesnt justify your point anymore, since some of us dont have shitloads of money.

To allow anything lesser means a sacrifice in innovation

This one is probably from the gaming community that isnt old enough to remember when one had to actually made your equipment last for a long time (when a usable PC still cost $2000) by getting every inch of that hardware used before thinking of that new upgrade. I'd think innovation would be to step up to the plate and get all the performance/quality out of the lowend/midrange before those who just blindly buy whatever is topend for $500+ expecting that everyone has their resources at hand. I'm not exactly asking for one to go down to Virges or integrated, but asking for innovation to happen within the hardware that's in the low-midrange first (read: Radeon 7500-9600 non LE).



(No nvidia quotes were given due to buyout of 3dfx)

Ask these guys.

You're right, you should choose your battles carefully!

There's a bit of a difference between 1.8 Ghz Celeron notebooks and 1.8 Ghz Pentium M processors.

Dell doesn't offer a 1.8 Ghz laptop with a Celeron processor. What you were looking at is this:

Dell

Go look on Pricewatch:

1.8 Ghz Celeron Notebooks starting at $800.
1.8 Ghz Pentium M Notebooks starting at $1700.

Where are my mod points when I'm forced to defend a company I don't particularly care for against trolls...?

Ibanez

+ go here for the Dimension 2400 (548 base)
+ remove $50 rebate
+ change RAM option to 512MB (+130)
+ change HD option to 80GB (+30)
+ change CD or DVD drive option to "8x DVD+RW Drive + 16x DVD-ROM Drive" (the most expensive option) (+139)
+ change speakers to Dell A425 Speakers (+10)
548 + 130 + 30 + 139 + 10 = 857

I agree whole-heartedly that Apples aren't ungodly expensive, especially considering the price of computers 10 years ago (4 grand for a 486DX4, anyone?). The thing is, you can consistantly spend less for comparable PCs or spend the same for more powerful PCs. By the time you get to $3k+ systems, PCs and Macs get closer in performance (dual G5s vs P4EE vs Athlon FX chips... choose your flavor), but for the budget crowd PCs are the better performance for price choice.

What R&D exactly? Did it cost them $70M to make a bunch of cheap parts overseas, throw them in a black case, and slap DELL on it?

I've had it up to here with your Dell bashing young lady!

If you take a look at Dell's business lines, you'll see some very impressive R&D at work.
Dell's 1U and 2U rackmounts are very well done, and the optiplex line is amazing.

Look at the Optiplex SX280
It's a 3ghz P4 inside a 12" by 13" by 3.5" case. Yet it still has 8x AGP, 6 USB ports and firewire.

Does Apple sell any machines that come with wallmount and under-the-desk mount brackets?

$61million in profits can barely drive R&D for a company like Dell or Gateway.

IANACPA, but I'd expect that a corporation would count R&D as an expense, and therefore someething that's deducted from revenue along with all the other expenses like payroll, raw materials, rent, equipment, taxes, beer bashes, corporate jet, marketing, legal expenses, warehouses, etc. Profit is what's left over after you subtract all those things from revenue.

According to it's annual report, Apple spent $471 million on R&D in 2003. I couldn't find any statement of R&D expenses in Dell's 2003 annual report, but I did learn that Dell had about $35 billion in revenue for that year. Fool.com tells us that Dell spends about 2% of sales on R&D, and if we agree that most of Dell's revenue comes from sales, we can guess that Dell probably spends around $700 million a year on R&D.

So yes, Apple's $61 million profit for the quarter wouldn't put much of a dent in Dell's R&D budget, but neither would it come even close to covering Apple's R&D.

Any thoughts on how long apple can keep up results this mediocre?

If they want to run the company like a Dell, not very long at all. But given that Apple is not Dell, and that people have been unsuccessfully predicting its demise since the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, I think they can keep it up for quite a while. And I hope they do, as Apple has been the most important innovator in the personal computer market for the last 28 years.

Here is a link for you, hey look you can get Red Hat on your workstation here in the US.

I don't know who told you they weren't selling here, looks to me like they are! dell.com

Dells Blog here has more information on this.
Clarifying Desktop Linux for Europe You may have seen news stories yesterday about Dell offering Linux on desktops in Europe. To clarify exactly what is being offered and by whom, this news article does a good job. We're always there to support the hardware we sell and at this time you can purchase an n-Series desktop system which will come with no factory installed OS (with a FreeDOS license and CD dropped in the box), but we are not currently factory installing Linux on desktops (with the exception of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Precision).

Dell still offers a Linux workstation. It comes with RedHat Enterprise Linux. They also have OSless desktops.

Don't get too excited though. It is still cheaper to buy a system preloaded with Windows XP than it is to purchase the exact system without an OS. I recently compared an Optiplex 170L (w/XP) to an Optiplex 170LN (w/FreeDOS on disk but not installed). The 170L came in at $593 while the 170LN with the exact same hardware and support contract was $716. Go figure. Mad propz to the U.S. Justice Department for keeping the Microsoft monopoly in check [end sarcasm].