Vostro: the "Business" Inspiron?

[Mercutio]

Anyone had the opportunity to play with a Dell Vostro for longer than two minutes?

I got to hold one for a couple minutes, and it felt as craptastic as an Inspiron typically does. One of my business customers is showing a lot of interest in them as a cheaper alternative to the Thinkpads (They have T30-series notebooks right now) I'd like to see them order.

Anyway, I don't want to outright reject the product, but if anyone has gotten to use one I'd love to hear your impressions.

 

[ddrueding]

I just ordered one of the cheapest Dell Vostro desktops, should arrive in a week or so.

 

[Mercutio]

I am not positive but I am just about convinced that a Vostro is just a shitty laptop with different color body panels.
I didn't even know there were Vostro desktops, but now I see that there are.

The wikipedia entry seems to support my conclusion as well.

"Known issues

Currently, all Vostro laptops suffer from three different issues - grainy WXGA+ screens[1], high pitched whiney noise (also known as the beep-problem)[2] and loose batteries[3]. Also there is a disturbing noise in the headphone jack, similar to electrostatic interference, that is impossible to reduce by the volume control panel. This is a hardware problem and there is no final fix. Dell is not responding appropriately to this issue, and the actual solution they give is to run RMClock (Windows only) to reduce the noise generation."

... and this is a business product.

 

[Mercutio]

My latest Dell catalog says something that I find VERY interesting:

It explicitly states in product comparisons which models have "North American Based Support."

This tells me two things:
1. They know full well that Americans have a hard time with the accents of the people staffing their call centers.
2. This seems to me like something not unlike an appeal to xenophobia if not outright racism.

 

[ddrueding]

This tells me two things:
1. They know full well that Americans have a hard time with the accents of the people staffing their call centers.
2. This seems to me like something not unlike an appeal to xenophobia if not outright racism.

Does it tell you both things at the same time? Because they seem mutually exclusive to me. Either there is a legitimate problem with their customers not understanding their support staff, or there isn't a legitimate problem, and Americans are racist.

Considering that #1 is an outright certainty, the part that makes me mad is that they know they are providing poor support.

 

[ddrueding]

Thinking on this further, perhaps they could just grade the quality of the language skills based on your support level.

Platinum-Uber support: All techs have graduate degrees in English literature from Oxford.

Super-Gold support: All techs have a working knowledge of English from old movies.

Standard support: All techs are given bad cell phones where the microphone has been disconnected.

 

[Mercutio]

Either there is a legitimate problem with their customers not understanding their support staff, or there isn't a legitimate problem, and Americans are racist.

Considering that #1 is an outright certainty, the part that makes me mad is that they know they are providing poor support.

... particularly if you've ever called Lenovo support and ANY other company's support service in the same day. I had to talk to Applecare today - supposedly renowned for its support - and it was like talking to a brick wall compared to Lenovo.

Talking to Dell, even GoldSelectWTFBBQ Service, is painful at best. Granted, the higher class of service is only "stub your toe" painful and not "shut your neck in a car door" painful (setting aside the matter of accents; I'm talking about the quality of the technical help), but, you know, I don't particularly want to stub my toe, either.

 

[[Edit]]

On positive thing about the Vostro lineup is that you have the option of ordering systems with WinXP instead of (V) (I) (S) (T) (A).

 

[ddrueding]

...and you can order 2 for the price of a Latitude, so you have a computer after you throw the first out a window.

 

[ddrueding]

Oh, and the super-cheap Vostro desktop? Decently fast and very quiet. After the de-crapifier was done with it, it was a very acceptable box (ordered with XP, of course)

 

[[Edit]]

Oh, and the super-cheap Vostro desktop? Decently fast and very quiet. After the de-crapifier was done with it, it was a very acceptable box (ordered with XP, of course)

I've seen one Vostro in person at someone's house (running XP). I saw nothing wrong with it mechanically.

As for de-crapification: I though they came without pre-loaded gobbledygook.

 

[ddrueding]

Nah, still a trial installation of something Norton-ish and some other junk.