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Whatever you think of Best Buy, they have a successful internal community in Blueshirtnation.com. A google search turns up quite a lot of industry praise on those guys. It was even written up the Groundswell book by Forrester.

If you want your bosses to buy, make sure you give them plenty of examples of other companies being successful at it.

For me, the biggest business benefit to the call center is knowledge sharing, but you have to be careful because communities need a critical mass in members to be successful (or a highly dedicated internal resource building content and encouraging participation). Only the biggest call centers could make it self-sustaining. However, another idea might be to launch a peer-to-peer support community and invite your customers in. You can have a private area for employees, but have a larger area where customers can ask support questions. And unlike email, once a question is answered, everyone can use it. Dell, Lenovo, Juniper, Linksys, AT&T, Blackberry all have successful support forums.

On IRC, I use it at work but my frustration is that it has no real history - I've seen the same questions come up time and again. On a forum you can search and find past discussions.

Disclosure: I work for Lithium Technologies , an online community provider.

According to this thread http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_audio&message.id=43688#M43688 the stereo mix drivers that Dell was supplied by SigmaTel (now Freescale Semiconductor) are being rejected by Vista on installation. The techs are working on it, but odds are SignaTel (not Dell) is being threatened by RIAA as not to supply the fix.

http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/66120/Correct_Sigmatel_audio_drivers_Stereo_Mix#
http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_audio&thread.id=40127&jump=true

According to this thread http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_audio&message.id=43688#M43688 the stereo mix drivers that Dell was supplied by SigmaTel (now Freescale Semiconductor) are being rejected by Vista on installation. The techs are working on it, but odds are SignaTel (not Dell) is being threatened by RIAA as not to supply the fix.

http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/66120/Correct_Sigmatel_audio_drivers_Stereo_Mix#
http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_audio&thread.id=40127&jump=true

Where on Gods green Earth can I find Dell PowerEdge servers running directly off DC?

Try here

Yes, I was surprised too - I've always thought of Dell servers as pretty low-end :P

Based on this guy's experience, it looks like they've already killed off one of the Ubuntu Inspiron notebooks (hopefully for something newer). http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/m essage?board.id=sw_linux&thread.id=11156

Whether you buy or build depends a lot on whom you're buying from. Buying from people who are not in the storage business, even if it is a big corporation like Dell, gives you about the same level of support as rolling your own when the shit hits the fan. Don't believe me? See this one, and notice how long the problem kept on and on (me is one of the happy users there):

http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/m essage?board.id=pv_raid&message.id=214&view=by_dat e_ascending&page=1

Buying from EMC or the likes (even EMC from Dell) tends to work better. The hardware is expensive, the consulting fee is expensive, and the support is expensive, but at least for that kind of money you are sure someone tries a bit harder to help.

All in all, it depends on your business. If you are making a zillion a month from that hardware working flawlessly, _not_ paying $200k for the storage is dumb. If you are making little enough so that $50k makes you think about it, rolling your own could be the way to go.

I had to click through several thread redirects before your Dell Dimension thread showed up:

http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/m essage?message.uid=18143969#U18143969

Not the first time. I was hit with this problem:

http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/m essage?board.id=cc_faq&message.id=329
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/4367 8/
http://news.com.com/Dell+hit+with+class+action+sui t+over+Inspiron/2100-1005_3-6150328.html

Ended up getting the credit card company to cover the bill as they doubled the warranty. To do this I had to spend many hours on the phone and a long time writing back and forth to the issuing bank, the wrong insurer the bank referred me to, the correct insurer and Dell (who I had to get to admit in writing that they'd have covered the problem if it had happened under warranty). I had the thing fixed. Took 5 months. I bought another laptop (sadly another Dell because $1000 price difference with the nearest competition including 2 extra years of warranty and the right set of features was hard to ignore) in the meantime.

It should be known that although Dell claims these systems work with Linux, there is a BIOS bug that causes USB (keyboard and mouse) to lock up intermittently. Dell claims they don't support operating systems installed by the end user. Here is a link to a very active Dell forum with hundreds of angry Linux customers upset because Linux doesn't operate correctly on their new PC. http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/m essage?board.id=sw_other&message.id=54328&view=by_ date_ascending&page=1