Sadly the college where I work has a pushy, aggressive arrogant, sleazy suit wearing Dell rep, he made the college sign a contract that, for Wintel machines, they can only buy Dells. Come to find out the head of IT, an adamant Apple basher, gets a kickback for every Dell sold (Dell is full of dirty tricks like this). Since the college went from mostly Macs to mostly Dells, though the number of computers on campus didn't change, they've had to put on four times the IT to constantly deal with problems, and there are tons. They trimmed the Apple tech person down to only one, and because Macs are far more dependable in day to day and for their lifetime the Mac person was so bored, they're making her learn MSE/CE bullcrap and she says she hates it. Anyhoo the estimates are rough but almost 1/4th of all the Dell machines are either DOA or have major problems, in every office I deal with at least one is down, back when we had mostly Macs nobody complained, now everybody does, at lunch, at meetings "my POS machine is down again" or "got another virus" (despite in theory a super strong firewall at the school) or I'll be on the phone with another office and they'll be saying "whoops, um, okay, my system crashed, I need to reboot, can I call you back?" (while of course my G5 is just humming along, as it has been, only needing to restart for the Security or OS updates). Peecees are pathetic and Dell leads the heap, and I do mean heap as in stinking heap of ****. The worse example of Dell's sucktacular "quality" (note scare quoting) was this internet cafe that they, of course due to the IT/Dell sleaze kickback deal, got all Dell laptops (found out for more than they could have gotten iBooks, the whole "peecee cheaper than Macs" myth is long dead to me). Of the 20 Dell laptops they had problems right away with half, seven were sent back and, this is classic, the seven that they got in exchange all had issues, one when it was plugged in started melting (or part of it, I never got the whole story). The whole point being Dell sucks big time and it's not being said here from an Apple zealot peecee hater perspective, fact is they're the bottom dweller of quality in peecees, run by a soulless jock, with low bid parts built in sweat shops. Like Microsuck, they're simply all smoke and mirrors marketing (and boy howdy, can't turn on a tele without some BS ad of theirs) with absolutely zero substance, quality, or style.
