Buying a PC with Dell: My Journey into Hell | Hacker News Reader

Buying a PC with Dell: My Journey into Hell

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17 pointsspideymans8 comments

Also worth checking out Linus Tech Tip's Secret Shopper series, where they buy a Dell PC over the phone while masquerading as an "average" PC buyer (hint: the experience is pretty shitty)

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz7WMF4wWko&t=430s

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2kCUbY4ZWs

Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ViO0ETvfEc

I think those of us in the industry often miss out on how confusing PC buying is for normal people. Things that are obvious to us is just cryptic technobabble for the general public.

Which is one of the reasons Apple is so successful (really, two reasons: simplified product differentiation, and customer service)

Everything I have read appears to be entirely self-inflicted. Had he been working through a flesh-and-blood Dell salesperson in a meatspace storefront, at least fault could be placed at their feet. But no. Pretty well every single mistake appears to be either ignorance or incompetence, enhanced by irrational and emotional panicking.

If you are going to use a machine for cutting-edge work, it might be a valuable life skill to actually learn something about it. I mean, a formula-1 race car driver might not be able to replace any of his mechanics, but dollars to dimes he’s likely doing the majority of his own wrench-slinging on his personal vehicles.

The same goes for computing, even if you’re just a blogger or vlogger or any other kind of non-technical power user - knowing your hardware and how to maximize what goes into it can familiarize you enough to avoid OP’s issues in part, if not fully. You don’t even need to be an expert, you just need to be decently familiar with most things.

FCLGA2066 4 core Xeon and a server like 2 minute boot time motherboard, in 2021. Still, I dont understand the drama - you have 2 weeks to send mail order items back no questions asked.

Is this what he bought? He didn't say the model or specs did he? It was very hard to read in these tiny sentences

Precision 5820, 4 Core model is a hunch based on description of computer being slower than 5 year old model. Whatever way it got configured it was money thrown into the toilet. Un-upgradeable with oem low cost parts, hard to sell and will lose value faster than ordinary 3rd party components, hard to work with enterprise oriented parts. There is nothing good about this computer if youre not a Fortune 500 company.

Only things I’d ever buy from Dell are some of its monitors, servers and XPS laptops. Most of their stuff is trash for a brand with good reputation.

Previous discussion (flagged, 14 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26926756

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