Dithering over

Oh well. It's considerably cheaper than I could have built it for, and if it's not to spec (which I have, in writing), it's going back. They gave me a freeby 3 year hardware warranty for some bizarre reason, so it's all alright in that respect. I'm aware of the Indian tech support, but if I need it, it'll most likely be for a diagnosed hardware problem.

Ooh, tell me more! I use Firefox, but haven't figured out how to get shockwave on it yet.

And now it's cancelled. Because dell are selling a considerably better PC for £40 less. WTF? If you look on the Dell Ubuntu site, you'll also see that the Ubuntu PCs are more expensive than the equivalent Windows box (I paid slightly less than the same model with windows). Anyway, now I'll have a Windows licence and a higher spec PC for less. And I can still shove Ubuntu onto it.

BTW, who would you recommend as an alternative to Dell given a fair few think they're s**te?

Apple.

Do look like I shit gold nuggets? Do I?

You are kidding?

Two words:

Norton. Symantec.

Remove all the pre-installed s**te and they go quite well.

To be fair though, you just made all that up didn't you.

You were a copper last week, and a mechanic the week before, do try keep up with yourself.

I thought they'd solved the laptop battery issue?

Hehe that actually made me laugh :-)

I kind of laughed, but only at the inaccuracy of the comment.

Mentioning a Mac instead of a PC made me laugh as well.

Accompanied by the sound of a chisel on slate Conor, managed to produce the following words of wisdom

Remove the Norton and Symantec s**te you mean? Cause that's exactly what I did when I set up a Dell system for someone the other week.

Stay away from ubuntu, I've installed it on a few PCs and every one of them has had the common boot loader fault after a few months. Get Red Hat or Mandrake I have run both of them without that problem. Yellow Dog also lets you get rid of that PoS that is OSX on G chipped Apples.

Some do some don't, I can't say for the rest of the Dell range but my XPS

1210 doesn't (but that's an ultra portable laptop so there isn't that much room left when the battery takes up the back, the CD drive one side and a PCMCIA slot and cooling fan takes up the other).

When the Samsung drive in my laptop failed they had an engineer with me the next day. (Why they wouldn't just ship me a drive I don't know as they had me take the first one out and re-install it to make sure it wasn't just loose. Even if they had it would have taken longer than next day anyway.) I'm no Dell fan but I was after a sub 14" laptop with Core2Duo and a real 3d card (not Intel) so I had no real option, screen is fantastic as well (Fast and clear with Oblivion running on it, easy to see with AutoCad and Solidworks).

Incredible, a fact free post.

So they haven't solved the problem with Sony batteries?

Extra Extra read all about it SteveH in Apple not perfect shocker.

It's a good start but there will be more stuff on there, I think Symantec must pay for there stuff to be put on to these systems so they can sell extended licenses after 6-12 months.

There was an alleged problem brought to light by the litigation culture and fuckwittedness of US consumers. The issue also affected just about every other mainstream laptop brand on the market - IBM / Lenovo, Sony, Dell etc.

But don't let that get in the way of the tedious Apple bashing.

And people say my Ford bashing is tedious.