They Sure Don't Make Them Like They Used To

Sean — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:32:27 +0200

Here’s an e-mail I got in my work inbox today:

Laptop users: Recent Dell machines are showing a trend towards disk failure. Make backups to cd-rom ! (and I don’t often use exclamation marks)

Since I am taking one of the Dell laptops to New Jersey with me, I thought I would follow up on this. Apparently 2 out of the 5 Dell laptops here have died. But I shouldn’t need to worry about mine (and Inspiron 2500), as it is a fairly old one and it is only the NEW drives that are having problems.

I was about to say “You would think that it would be the OLDER hardware that would fail” but then I thought about it for a minute. How many people out there have old hardware that runs fine? I mean, right now my firewall is running on an old(ish) computer running linux using a fairly old 4 GB hard drive. Granted, I am not going to be running anything critical on it, but it does get the job done. In comparison, any large hard drive I get these days is going to be from Seagate, due to their awesome 5 year warranty and the fact that drives I have gotten from Maxtor and Western Digital haven’t lasted even 3 years (but haven’t died when they were my own property thankfully). The network admin here agrees, apparently only getting Seagate drives cause everything else is junk and the 5 year warranty is a very nice bonus.

Also, back in Ontario, the home workstation for my mom is still a Pentium 90 (unless my mom actually went and bought a new computer for herself, which I doubt) which still runs fairly well (you know, for a Pentium 90).

So what is wrong with hardware these days? Are companies banking on the consumer to keep up with the ‘latest and greatest’ in hardware? Or are the latest hard drive enabled devices (MP3 Players, Game Consoles, etc) causing companies to push faster speeds and greater capacities in order to land cushy mass production contracts? With news items such as Spyware Removal: Drop PC In Dumpster showing the intelligence of the general consumer indicates a little of the former. Recent rumors of Samsung attempting to sell Apple on the idea of flash memory for iPods seems to indicate a little of the latter.

In the end, if you haven’t figured it out by now, shop smart, don’t shop Dell.

Crazy Or Genius?: They Sure Don't Make Them Like They Used To

They Sure Don't Make Them Like They Used To