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Dell CEO Tells All
zapatero writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has an enjoyable read with new Dell CEO Kevin Rollins. He has quite a critique of the HP acquisition of Compaq: 'They had a great, profitable printer business before. They still have a great, profitable printer business. ... Their profits are 70 to 80 percent from the printer business. So that's the area where the profit pool still lives. It's where it lived before. It's where it still is now. So I just ask, what's changed?'"
I didn't know compaq makes good printers... I have a Compaq IJ600 and it's a piece of junk that drinks ink. When I think of quality printers, I think of HP and the Laserjet series, not Compaq and the IJ trash. It also took forever to get running on Linux.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Yet another woefully inaccurate story title.
Yet another bitchy comment complaining about the slashdot editors.
Yet another self-referential comment mocking its own lack of originality.
Yet another excuse of an, uh, my brain hurts.
The first two were Compaqs, and they are trash.
See, these computers had the cheapest possible parts in them. I had bought a 700 mhz PC right around the time that 1ghz was looking a-fucking-mazing.
Years later, after I learned how to build the damn things, I picked apart the old machine for scrap - not only was the chip locked in some sort of megavault/heatsink to avoid swapping; but they actually screwed me out of 10 gb of space - I had ordered 40 gb, they gave me 30.
My biggest complaint, however, is that the tech support people were the rudest, most arrogant assholes this side of Slashdot.(joke :D)
True story - my PC had been infected - again, before I learned about "reformatting" and "firewalls" - and I called up support. After 20 minutes on hold, I was informed my support contract was up. So, needing to fix this problem, out came another big sum of money from the folks' Visa.
After payment was made, and I was returned to a support guy, I was asked for the version of windows. I told him XP.
Well, since the PC came with 98, he informed me that he was not authorized to help me with my problem.
That's when I was done with Compaq forever.
However, their all in one units were pretty reliable, and I couldn't be more than happy with my new HP a-i-o. It prints (FAST), scans, copies, does photos above par with what I can get at those bullshit Kodak consoles, faxes, and reads from memory stick.
So yeah, the printers are nice. But fuck if I'll ever buy one of their desktops again - I find it amazing that some people pay close to 2000 bucks for a PC without getting a top of the line GPU. Sad.
Off topic, but I had to say it: HP's printers aren't that great. Always an Epson for me.