here is my opinion and experience about dell
the complete care warranty and service is great. u send in your dell for repair for the keyboard. they ship it back with a new screen and keyboard. dell offers to renew your complete care warranty but it is very expensive after the initial 3 year period
i felt dell's interest rate of 25 to 29 % was pretty high. iirc it was 29.90 %
i wish dell's bios wasn't stripped down of features, like over clocking. the desktops ship with smaller power supplies.
in order to get support or downloads , dell asks you for your product key. or your express service code. the code is put on the bottom of your laptop on a cheap sticker and will either rub off or fall off over normal use. you need to save those codes. its a good thing that dell puts each product key in bios. otherwise you would probably lose it.
dell's laptops have copy protection in them for their chargers. . if its not an authentic dell charger, it will refuse to charge.
i bought two machines one was a laptop and a desktop both were "studio xps" models. only one was authorized to run windows 7 and the other was only authorized to run windows vista. i bought them both more or less the same time
at the time of purchase windows 7 was not out yet. ( more on this later)
i think apple support and the quality of their machine is better then dell
does apple care even offer Accidental damage like apple care plus on its laptops?
my biggest gripe about dell is i purchased one of their high end core 2 duo laptops. it is a Studio XPS 1340. it had 2 video cards. and a leather patch on the back. it was the high end cousin to the 1330. before that they had a studio line and a xps line and they were merged into one product
about one year or so after i bought the machine , dell completely stopped manufacturing 9 cell batteries for the machine. no main stream manufacturer like energizer , duracell makes batteries for my laptop. the 1330 batteries don't fit the 1340.
if i want to buy a new 9 cell battery i have to buy one from a counterfeiter.
dell left us all out in the cold on battery packs.
after 3, 5 or 7 years of ownership i think you are more likely to be able to get replacement parts for your mac then a dell machine
macs have bootcamp and you can also run vmware fusion. or parallels. . buy the mac and buy a copy of windows and you don't need to worry about mac vs windows.
i liked how easy it was to remove the hard disk on my dell. so anytime it broke like twice or three times i had to send it in, i sent it in without a hard disk
windows:
dell ships your machine pre authorized to run certain windows versions. your product key is stored in a special area of its flash bios called the SLP or SLIC. this is not how they do windows 8. i think SLP is for 7 and older. anyway. i bought 2 machines from dell. more or less at the same time. the SLP on one was authorized only to run VISTA, and the other one was authorized to run 7.
before windows 8. when you bought a new machine from dell it came with like regular windows. and if you wanted ultimate they charged more money. but the product key doesn't change. if you can get your hands on a OEM dell cd from a friend you can reinstall ultimate and save the $140 or whatever dell charges and you don't even need a product key, because it is stored in flash bios
having your windows serial number in the bios saves you from having to pay for a license key, since your machine is already authorized to run certain oem windows versions
buyer tip about being forced to buy dell counterfeit batteries:
if you type "powercfg energy" at the command prompt , it will give you the maximum capacity of the battery and the capacity of full charge.
you take full charge / maximum capacity * 100 to get the health of the battery. they both should be more or less equal. when i had to buy counterfeit dodgy batteries because dell refused to make them , i found out that the ones i bought were already 75% used up
