Dumbass DELL Sales team

"And if you want to play games on this machine, You will ha ve absolutely no problem! Lets run a game now and show you!

<inserts Prince of Persia, The Sands of Time>

<Waits for !!!VIDEO!!! to play>

See, look how realistic and smooth the graphics are. This machine will have no problems running games today."

Price: 1024 quid.

DUMBASSES. and some poor old souls will have swiped out their credit card and purchased this *mediocre* system.


Okay okay, the purchasers would have been lucky because its a x600- not a bad- graphics card- but they could have run POP on a geforce 3 for gods sake. It annoys me that they can show you how good the graphics are by playing a video.

Chances are, the seller doesnt even know the difference himself either!!!! >.<;;

I'm confused, Dell is a direct sales operation. How did they manage to demo the machine over the phone?

haven't you heard of video-phone!!! ;) hehe

Yeah, Microsoft are trying to same thing, they released the X-Box 360 and trying to pass it off with crappy graphics. Claiming it to be the next generation console.

( Haha, I'm just messing. :P )

What Indiepath said. I'm confused. :P

Dell now has these setups in the malls around all over the USA... Don't buy from them.
I did... And I will never do the same mistake again...

It depends on what you are looking for -- if you want a cheap machine that is decent for office-applications, some web browsing & email -- great.
But if you want a gaming machine you're in the wrong place.

But with pretty much *any* computer retail place you're going to run into sales people that have been living under a rock for the past 30 years, and know absolutely nothing about the technology they are selling. After all, if they truly understood everything there was to know about computers in-and-out, most of them wouldn't be stuck in a dead-end retail sales job.
(I'm not saying that every sales person is clueless, just that the more technically knowledgable folks tend to gravitate towards better jobs elsewhere, so you're less likely to run into them when buying a computer)

Not true... You can save a bunch of money by not byuing from them... Believe me...

hehe, actually, it was on QVC - They had a salesperson there. :)

I'll believe you when you show us. If you can show us a machine that's cheaper than the low end Dells ( without the "don't count a monitor as I don't need one and I'll reuse the dvd from my old machine" ) I'll believe you. I've tried, and I can't manage it.

Bought one of their laptops, very great. Got it much cheaper than I could anywhere else, too.

Just messing nothing. It's TRUE! I saw an ad for Call of Duty 2 for XBOX 360 over thanksgiving, and the entire commercial was an FMV sequence! I commented on this and my sister's husband who owns an XBOX insisted that it was actual footage from the game, but I've actually played the game in the stores and there is no way that what they have in that commercial is actual gameplay.

It's just like when the 360 was first announced and they showed this football game with amazing visuals and it was finally revealed that it was FMV and the gameplay itself looks nothing like that at all. The 360 is nothing more than a PC with a mid range 3D card, not even as powerful as the one I have in my PC now that I bought a year ago.

SSwift: While I agree that many of the initial XBox 360 games have very unimpressive graphics, I suspect it may be because the XBox360 launch was horribly rushed by Microsoft, and that many companies have simply released sloppy XBox ports ( or in the case of Perfect Dark, a conversion, since there will be no XBox version ) which may explain it. I won't be buying one because there are no games I want for it, and I don't expect many ( any? ) to come along either. But I do suspect the XBox 360 is capable of better than we've seen so far.

I believe it isn't capable of more, but that developers will find ways to cheat the system and squeeze out more fps in a years time like they've done every other system to date.

cheat/optimize .. same deal really :)

Gab:

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=95738

+

Stick in your choice of monitor from that site or somewhere, works out pretty cheap. I got someone a basic system for £380, inc delivery and VAT.

Not bad, but still a lot more expensive than some of the Dell systems. They've had a laptop sale this pas week for $399 (£232) in the US. (1.4GHz, 256MB, DVD/CDRW combo drive, 40GB HD, wifi, free color printer)

Not necesarily something I'd buy myself, but their sales prices are near impossible to beat, even with whitebox no-name components. They get some insane discounts from Intel...

£380 is about $650 US dollars. Dell pretty much has their basic workstations on perpetual sale for around $499, including 17" CRT. (Always have the same ads on the back of some of the newspaper inserts for a long time now) There's a reason they are one of the most popular brands in the US...

Noodle, I got a dell Latitude c640 for £235. Thats a 2ghz Pentium 4 m, 512mb memory, radion 7500 (works well with blitz at least and makes a good test platform) No wifi, no printer.

I'm not against dell totally- But i am against how they will use the fact that most computer owners dont know that much about them, to sell a mediocre machine for £1024, to someone who probrably only wants to use MS word 97.

On the upside, They were still trying to sell it yesterday, and someone called up about their "New technology DDR memory "- and pointed out that they have DDR3 now, Most new systems use DDR2 and this "Great machine" only used standard DDR.

That cought the beggars out :D

Most of the dell systems i've seen, are excluding VAT and delievery cost, which usually add an extra $150 on. But, i've not extensivly looked so :o) I back down... for now ¬_¬

Ross, they have to include VAT in the pricing - it's the law now, I believe. I get sent Dell offers through the mail regularly. The low prices they charge for some system amazes me, frankly. Sure, it's cheap, plasticky tack, but it does the job.

To think I spent £1300 on my P150Mhz laptop, several years ago. *sigh* :/

Ross backs away further... ¬_¬

Ross, come back! Wanna buy a laptop???? :P

¬_¬...















Yeah sure! Me gets out his credit card :D

Uh ... Madden for the 360 looks just like that sequence that was shown last year. In fact both the games I have for the system look very good ... near Toy Story visuals. Think Doom 3 but with many more polygons. That's also to speak nothing of how nice the system interface is ... which completely blows a PC or any other console away.

.

Laptops aside I dont really get why programmers buy whole systems. Surely building a PC is an integral part of understanding how the computer works and thus improving your knowledge. Sure building a PC is only board swapping level knowledge, but basic knowledge is an important foundation.

Learning about software and hardware compliment each other and in that regard I dont think Dell or any other manuracturer is cheap at all because of the non-tangeable loss of knowledge compared to a DIY build - I think it's an expensive mistake for the technically inclined to buy a system.

If I can do it with long fingernails and a complete genetic inability to grasp anything mechanical or with moving parts, you lot should find it easy.

my first pc was a broken one- i started out by fixing it.
It had a virus on it and all the floppys that came with it- me not knowing about viruses, figured it was a memory issue ("PARITY ERROR B")

I know how to build systems and know quite a bit about the workings etc- But these days it IS getting cheaper to buy a system new thaqn to build one. I think the manufacturers saw what was about to happen and lowered the prices accordingly. i think.

How about this:

Dell Top-of-the-line gaming laptop, the one they refer to as the "AlienKiller" in promotional material. The Dell XPS laptop.

Not only is it more expensive, it's also got worse hardware than the Alienwares it's supposed to kill.

What kind of weird computers do they have at your place? Babbage machines? :o>

the £499 one on the front of www.currys.co.uk will work fine for me :)

Do the new budget boxes generally come with a free PCIe slot? I thought it was great, back in the day, how you could buy a really cheap (but, vitally, stable) PC, stick a big fat graphics card in it (because they all had spare PCI slots) and watch it cope pretty well for years and years thereafter. That's the route I'd go for again, provided there's actually some way to add a modern GFX card.

heh, Last time i bought a cheap PC they'd removed the AGP socket from the motherboard!

That's exactly why I lament tha passing of PCI! I had to start faffing around with new mobo's and whatnot to get into the AGP party. I'm going to hold off if budget outfits are gonna be just as moronic about PCIe - I don't want to have to go full-out to Nerdsville just to have decent graphics on a machine that, let's face it, needs be nothing more than average in any other capacity.

I just bought a dirt cheap PC and it has a PCI Express slot in it.