Stupid Dell

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, October 2, 2006

I swear, the more I deal with them, the more I hate dealing with Dell. Apple, on the other hand, becomes more pleasant the more I deal with them.

Last night, one of our Dell servers stopped working in many ways. I noticed most of the failures were “Input/Output Error”. A quick google search revealed that this is likely a bad HD. Well that is not Dell’s fault, but it is very unlikely for such a thing to happen when the system is new, and using hardware RAID-1 (mirroring). So, I get to the office and try to figure out what the deal is. Dell’s built in RAID controller (PERC 5i IIRC) decided to turn itself off. A quick reboot fixed it, but still, this should not have happened in an enterprise level system.

This was hot on the heals of a screwup on Dell’s part. We ordered 6 rack mounted computers, but only received 4. Turns out that their automated system rejected two of them as duplicates, even though they had a different purchase order, different quote number, different comments, and in one case, a different price. Good thing we gave up and called them because they would have never shipped it. At least they were kind enough to set the date to the original order date so we could actually buy the thing.

Oh well, last Friday the three MacBooks arrived. Maybe this will be the start of using Macs in the future :)