Dell - A cautionary tale

[Sarduci]

@OP -You're complaining about your Geo Metro not being able to keep pace with my Ford Mustang at the race track. Your "damn cheap" solution is exactly what you paid for.

Don't get me wrong, I still feel the Dell was excellent value for money and I'd still buy them but I've learned something about them which I'll remember in the future.

The Dell came with a leaflet explaining how to fit a graphics card, install memory, and replace the CPU. What it didn't come with is a list of supported processors or more importantly a list of unsupported processors. Dell's BIOS updates do not have release notes beyond "Added support for new Intel processors". Dell lead you to believe that you can perform a variety of upgrades without making clear the exceptions.

It's a gotcha and I got got. The point of the post is not to complain but to help others avoid my mistake.

Before ordering next time, give the folks at Dell a call. [img]../forum/images/smilies/thumbsup.png[/img] They'll be able to tell you what CPUs are supported 99% of the time unless you want to put in something that was way different than the stock family.

Sorry if it came off a bit harsh, it's just that it irks me sometimes that people are hard on a particular manufacturer (of anything) without understanding that it's a much bigger issue than the one brand. My Windows 2008 server running Hyper-V gets bashed all the time by people for being "bloated" but these same people go for the throat when I trash talk all of the memory leaks with Firefox that I don't seem to have in IE7..... (for the record, I'm all best tool for the job with anything computer related, but getting free stuff at road shows is good on the personal budget!)