I got yet another Dell flyer through the letterbox this very morning. What joy!
What they said . . .
“The Inspiron 546, lets you customise its level of performance to suit your exact needs. You get exactly what you need and nothing you don’t.”
What they meant . . .
“You get Vista. No choice. If Vista’s performance “suits your exact needs” you’re probably asleep most of the time.”
[Purpose of Dell’s mindless comma (after “546”) – unknown.]
What they said . . .
“Choose your processor from an AMD Athlon X2, to a Phenom X4. So you can check an email, edit a digital photo, and run your virus protection – all at the same time.”
What they meant . . .
“Whichever processor you choose, with Vista, and some luck, you might be able to match the performance of OS-MFT on an IBM mainframe in 1964, OS/2 on a 486 in 1989, Linux on a Pentium in 1994, or practically any mobile phone on the market in 2009. Maybe.”
[Purpose of Dell’s mindless comma (after “X2”) – unknown.]
I don’t know about Dell particularly, but the ads placed in magazines/newspapers by PC World and their ilk are pretty bad. There’s something very patronising about the wording if you know anything about desktop systems.
“Whichever processor you choose, with Vista, and some luck, you might be able to match the performance of OS-MFT on an IBM mainframe in 1964, OS/2 on a 486 in 1989, Linux on a Pentium in 1994, or practically any mobile phone on the market in 2009. Maybe.”
Was OS-MFT around that early? Anyway, it would have delivered more work as it didn’t have to resource any mouse management or eye-candy.
I once got a flyer from them that started: Dear so-and-so, Since you have been a customer of Dell since 1900…
Methinks they should get their system clock working first before trying to sell me another system (yes, I did buy a laptop from them, that’s how I got put on their mailing list, and the purchase was advantageous tax-wise at the time). That laptop still works fine with openSUSE.
My mistake – 1966. Cant say I miss MFT all that much, but I sure do miss VM. (The first two languages I learned were for use on a System 360-50 OS-MFT/HASP machine – JCL and Assembler (BAL). Happy days.)
I don’t hate Dell, by the way, just their gormless marketing. This Dell tower I’m using is about 8 years old, and still going strong. It’s a well-designed and easy to use case, and it’s been a pleasure to mess with its innards over the years. It even looks good. I have a 1TB SATA drive on my desk, waiting to be installed in it just as soon as the IDE-SATA card arrives in the mail. (It’s destined for the SATA machine I haven’t got yet.)
“Choose your processor from an AMD Athlon X2, to a Phenom X4. So you can check an email, edit a digital photo, and run your virus protection – all at the same time.”
Indeed. I often find myself, reading my single email whilst at the same time editing my digital pictures.
I find this easy because:
I have three arms, 4 eyes and, two monitors
I use Linux & do them one after the other
Incidentally, I heard with Windows Vista you, can turn off your anti virus protection because once, the haxx0rs have done their thing, the system is in fact more, useable & responsive.
