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October 12, 2008

“Dell Wars” Episode VII – Death of an Empire

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Written by: Christopher McCulloh
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Hey, wait, I thought I was done with Dell? Especially after the first six episodes? Yeah, and I thought Lucas was done making movies, but they keep coming, and it just keeps getting worse.

So, yesterday I decided to buy a new laptop. I’m recording an online Lecture series with IUPUI CSCI Dept. and I need a laptop to do it on. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Surely… surely, he didn’t buy a Dell… right?” At this point, you’re probably expecting me to say “wrong”, but actually, I’m not a fracking idiot. I’ll never give Dell another red cent in my entire life. I bought an HP.

Modest 15.4″ Screen

4 GB Ram

2.1 GHZ AMD Turion X2 Ultra 64

Vista Home Premium

ATI RADEON HD 3200 Graphics card

WiFi

LightScribe Direct Disc Labeling DVD Burner

SD-MS/Pro-MMC-XD media card reader

Removable Remote Control thingamabob (so I can use it as a TV)

Lots of lovely little ports some of which I don’t know the name for (USB/eSATA/HDMI/Network/phone/monitor/etc)

So, I get this thing home. Get my wifi network back up and running, and low an behold, aparently this pissed off my Dell.

She must have gotten jelous of the new girl in town, because when I walked in the room after getting my lappy all up and running, the dell was deader than a doornail.

She won’t even turn on. She just sits there with front panel error codes indicating she has bad memory. No bios screen, nothing. Just a number 3 and a number 4 lit up in green, as if to say, “Fine! I’m leaving!”.

I even ripped out all the memory and hit the power button to see if it would give me the correct error codes for “no memory found”, but nope. It still claims to have memory, but claims the memory is bad.

Well, guess what Dell? That’s BS! You were going to remain my primary, but now it really does look like I’m abandoning you to the cobwebs of irrelevancy! Good ridance you over priced piece of crap! You never worked right in the first place!

If I didn’t think there was a chance I could fix it (probably have to buy a new motherboard, this will be it’s third one) I’d take it out back and beat the snot out of it with a baseball bat.

I HATE DELL COMPUTERS!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!



About the Author

Christopher McCulloh
E-Commerce developer at Finish Line Co-Author of HTML, XHTML and CSS All-in-one Desk Reference for Dummies Graduated from IU with a Bachelors of Media Arts and Science and a Certificate in Applied Computer Science. Tech Editor for Building Facebook Applications for Dummies and Building Websites All-in-one for Dummies 2nd Edition. Creator and maintainer of the Status-bar Calculator Firefox Extension Three years professional experience in Java E-Commerce Development and four years professional experience with PHP for a combined total of seven years professional JavaScript/HTML/CSS experience




 
 

 
 

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