Wednesday, July 23, 2008

A new toy


I finally cracked. My computer is about 8 years old and actually not in too bad a shape, in the scheme of things, but it hangs and becomes unstable a bit too easily and something fundamental is broken because it won't show videos. I'm not talking about 'special interest videos', as Chris W calls them, but You Tube stuff, news clips et al. I could probably change this but it needs stripping back to the metal and a clean install of everything to get it back into shape. Given that an up to date copy of Windows would costa plenty and I don't want to spend the rest of my life updating software and, even more importantly, If I attempted to do it myself it would probably leave me without a machine for days. These things are never straightforward. As much as I would like one, I can't afford a Mac. So it's back to Dell. In the past I have bought three Dell machines and been very pleased. They do what they say on the tin.

With Dell France you used to be able to order on-line, in France, for a UK spec machine. Not anymore. If you try to order on-line in the UK you have no choice but to input a UK address. In the end, and after a lot of frustration because I could never get through on the 0844 sales line, I called Dell head office in the UK and they put me through to a chap in India.

I ordered the machine on Monday, it was built on Tuesday and left Limerick in Ireland today, Wednesday, with UPS. So far so good.

4 comments:

Mark said...

Enjoy your new toy.
Just had my 2 year old pc rebooted back to factory settings. It’s like I have just opened the box!

Alex said...

I'll have a go with the old one when the new one is up and running. Should be fun!!

MrsJ said...

What operating system did you get on your new laptop?

We ordered one for LeeLee and it needed to have XP - but Dell came back and said only if we bought a more expensive one or, weirdly, the cheapest model!

So we are now looking at HP and Toshiba - which is a bummer because we have always had, and liked, Dell.

Jacqui
xxxx

Alex said...

Hi Jacqui, I bought a desktop with a Vista OS. I waited until SP1 came out and then a little more and then bit the bullet. So far I'm pleased with it.