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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

This comment would be meaningful if it even contained a hint of an anecdote. "Well deserved" how, exactly?

I've owned 3 Dell laptops in the past 2 years.

First one's screen broke. Second one's graphics card was faulty. Third one's sound was messed up, sent the PC in for repairs. Dell technicians dropped it on the ground, blamed me for doing it, then refused to further support it.

I don't care one way or the other if anyone else buys Dell; but there's no chance in hell that I will ever again.

Okay, anecdotes with anecdotes. The dell laptops that I've had (from the latitude series. That ugly gray one) have been sturdier than most bricks. I've dropped them on my wood floor, they've been tossed around in my backpack, had things spilled on them, and been abused in every way you can imagine.

They still keep chugging.

*When I'm talking about multiple laptops, I'm talking about multiple laptops within my company. Not my personal laptop [although I have had one]

I think this is because you are comparing the business laptop to the consumer edition. While I haven't actively shopped laptops for a few years, I have noticed that the business editions, while a tad more expensive and less "stylish", are usually much better built. My friends' consumer Dell laptops consistently fail within the first 1.5 years or so. My father's 6 year old Dell survived much abuse, and is doing fine.

The business versions of laptops are usually far better built, but you cannot buy them at Best Buy and the like.

The older Dell laptops seem to fare much better than the newer ones.

I'll chip in for him. They're made of cheese, unreliable, have shitty bios implementations, crap battery life and horrid screens and keyboards.

That's an approximation of a review, but "shitty" is a relative thing. Compared to what?

Nothing is more annoying than opinions like "I hate X because it sucks" without an insightful counter-point like "You should try Y because it's much better for reasons A, B and C."

Shitty compared to my reference point of "fit for purpose".

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