Re: [TCLUG:951] Dell good Linux Box?

[Christopher Reid Palmer <jaymz@acm.cs.umn.edu>]

On Sat, 22 Aug 1998, Neal Tovsen wrote:

> We just had a string of Lattitude laptops
> that are causing a lot of grief (seems they actually shipped
> a product without even installing the proper drivers for
> Windows, then included an image CD with corrupt files...!!),

Say, that's not he first time I've heard of that. At my work we got two
Dell Dimension [ some numbers and letters here ]'s, and one came with 95
and the other NT. The NT one wouldn't boot, right out of the box.
Apparently Dell didn't see fit to include drivers for the SCSI card the
HDD was connected to. We chalked it up to excessive crack usage and
installed 95 on it, with the media that came with the other one.

> but their desktops and past laptops have been great.

I tend to agree, in general. I like the case design, very easy to work
with. I bleed much less from pokey metal than with other PC enclosures.

> As an interesting side-note,
> Dell NEVER uses CPU fans. My current 333 PII doesn't even
> have one, nor does either of our brand-new 350Mhz servers!
> They do have some HUGE heat-sinks, though, and
> well-ventilated cases. Tech support says removing the fans
> is good b/c fans tend to be comparatively unreliable and a
> common point of failure on other brands...

Yeah, I noticed the same thing. Still, I'd like to have a fan or five in a
PII with SCSI. The upside is that we didn't need to replace our broken
microwave -- we can reheat our lunches in the cases. It works great.

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