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Dell XPS 'Gaming' PC Review
cojsl writes "[H]ard|OCP has an entertaining review of a Dell XPS 400 'Gaming PC'." From the article: "If the Dimension XPS400 is any indication, Dell considers computer gamers a joke. Harsh, yes. But we think it's accurate. The system itself is a decent gaming platform and the hardware was well built. It was put together decently with parts that can pull the weight required to play today's graphically intensive games. But we couldn't even install one of the most popular games on the market, Sims 2, and trying to play other popular games would lock up the system and gaming sessions, when they would run, would get interrupted. The pre-installed programs that Dell chose to include on its computer were almost certainly the cause of all these problems, and unloading these programs from the boot-up routine fixed the problems."
I don't know why it is that vendors insist on preloading so much crap on their machines when they ship them but it drives me crazy.
:P
We buy Toshiba laptops at my place of work and whenever we get a new one in, its preloaded with the Toshiba default build.. and its pretty awful! When you first fire it up you have to run the gauntlet of about 5-10 pop up windows from apps all letting you know that they are there and running. Cast a glance down to the system tray and there are about 11 or 12 memory resident apps all sitting there taking their cut of the memory and CPU time - one was a Toshiba app that basically takes over the Microsoft power management suite with a far more complex and convoluted piece of software!
I don't understand it personally. Windows might grind the gears of plenty of people but these days its quite a sleek, easy to us OS - why must they insist on bundling all this crap on the machine which must surely confuse users, and give them so much more overhead in places that they don't even need it! Not to mention the quite obvious performance impact on the machine.
I still prefer to make my own PC's - most recent build was for my girlfriend - a really nice Biostar IDEQ barebones box based on an AMD Sempron/NForce3 250 combo! It goes like a rocket, and there is no clutter and crapola on it! Other than Windows
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Any sensible business should be either re-installing the systems themselves after purchase, or paying someone else to do so - in both cases based on the company's actual requirements (software, network/profile setup, configuration, devices).
One size fits all doesn't work, and it's the reason for many problems with Windows even after careful configuration.
Careful configuration (switching off unneeded services for example) makes a huge difference to the resources used by Windows, and can help security also.
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Funny how you guys don't seem to get the CDs in the States.
While I'll agree that Dell can't exactly make a gaming PC, it has to be said that refurbished Dells can be a source of quality parts for a good price, assuming you purchase their higher line machines and not their low end stuff. I'm really only a casual gamer so I may not count, but the last time I did a full system upgrade, I found that there was absolutely no way I could build an entire machine for cheaper than it would cost me to purchase a refurbished Dell and then add a few key parts. I bought a refurbished Dimension 8300 and 19" monitor, tossed in another 512MB of RAM, binned the 64MB GeForce 5200 in favor of a Radeon 9800 Pro (top dog in October '03, even despite pesky driver issues), and installed a SB Live! I had lying around. Yes, the preinstalled OS was a joke and I had to do a clean install, but in the end I calculated that I probably came out ~$150 - $250 cheaper than if I had built it myself and bought a brand new monitor. And it was only mildly less labor intensive than building an entire PC from scratch. I'm still using the PC now, albeit with even further upgrades from stock.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
forcing customers to use software preinstalled on their hard drive to burn their own backup discs is absolutely the worst policy ever. this is of course just one problem of this dell model, but so many companies are starting to do this, and they need to stop.
most people who don't have a clue what they are doing won't even think to perform the important step of making a backup disc, and will only think about restore discs after their computer fails. then they are completely out of luck.
i will never buy a PC from a manufacterer ever, except for apple. it's always a bad deal, anyone who takes the 1 hour of time to learn how to build their own computer will reap the benefits of overclocking, having a fresh, clean version of windows OEM edition for $80-$130, and having infinate customizability.
as for notebooks, well, i just have to buy the least Dell-like brand availible. buying off-brands is actually strangely enough the best way to go in this age. and usually you end up getting the best deal and similar quality, since all the major manufacterers buy from the exact same Chinese suppliers that the smaller brands do.
Aside from the curiosity that they have someone listed as a "Grammatical (sic) and Spelling Editor -- whose duties evidently do not extend to punctuation (should be: manufacturers'), this passage translates as: "normally, we only review stuff we can get for free -- we paid for this one." I don't have a problem with the practice of reviewing Hardware from the retail perspective: indeed, for similar reasons and about the same time, Tom's Hardware has taken the same step. What's worrisome is the curious mix of the "Consumer Reports" style with an allusion to a failed negotiation with Dell's Marketing Department. Well, okay, maybe not an allusion: it is conceivable that nobody at [H]ard OCP tried to contact "the largest manufacturer in North America" for a "review copy" deal. It is conceivable, but not likely.
So at the start of the review, the editors tell us that Dell "won't play ball", and they probably spent around $3000 in taxes and restocking fees. The review that follows, of course, will not reflect these facts.
And the review that follows is a beauty: tearing into Dell for all those awful bundling practices they negotiate with third parties to bring the price down further, for not including a recovery diskette, then charging $11 for an OS CD, and having crappy customer support. Oh yeah, the system is unstable as Hell because, after running their "torture test" on the original setup -- with all the crap running., it crashed at the 24 hour mark. system restore.
Then, at the end of the article, the editor steps in with the reason for all this:
For those of you that missed it, the Review in question evaluates a system a couple notches up in the performance category (but, one assumes, since Gateway's marketing dept. played ball, the journalistic budget didn't factor in). But even hardware differences aside, methodologically the two cases aren't comparable. As far as bloatware goes, the Gateway shipped not only with McAfee's antivirus (which the Dell review repeatedly cites as a nuisance and a cause of instability), but also Norton and BigFix. The drivers were not 3 months out of date like at Dell, but 8 months (to which the reviewer says: "Big deal? Not really" and proudly states he installed the latest driver immediately -- instead of, like the Dell review, going to try out games he knew wouldn't work). The Gateway had tons of toolbars and installed bloat. What did the reviewer do?:
I wonder if this problem has gotten better or worse over the years... (as I remember the days of "Packard Bell Navigator" and *shudder*)
I still remember back around late middle-school/early high-school (when I fixed people's computers as a side-job). I had my custom build and nicely configured 486DX2-66, and my upgrade cycle was offset by a year or two from many people in my area. So all these people I knew had just upgraded to new Pentium-based machines, which on-paper were probably better than mine by a long way. (of course they were also mostly store-bought crap) In any case, these machines were all so overloaded with gunk that in actual use, my measly 486 was *much* faster and thrashed *much* less often.
(Yes, this was all in the early/middle Win9X days... Back then my only Linux tinkerings was a brief flirtation with SLS, and eventually some version of Slackware that came in a Linux book I bought.)
Of course my 486 only had 8MB of RAM, which was pretty sweet when I first got it (most friends had machines with 4MB, and our previous family machine had 2MB). Heck, I even had a friend who had a 386DX-40 with 4MB who managed to tweak Win95 so well that he could usably run several programs on it at the same time. Ahh, those where the days, when tweaking and squeezing every last ounce out of one's desktop was a big factor that separated the geeks from the average luser. (and when the accelerated XFree86 x server actually had *faster* graphics than Windows)