I have a saying. “It needn’t be hell — just don’t buy it from Dell®!” There now follows a short essay on why…

I was asked to select and purchase a new laptop for work. After much deliberation, I selected a Compaq ( = HP) nx7300. It has an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, a fair bit of RAM, a HD that’s far larger than we need, and it was about £500 or something.

(Actually, it’s quite impressive. No matter how much work I throw at it, the fans never start up, and the case never gets warm. And yet it eat arithmetic like candy! I think I might have to buy myself one! OTOH, it comes without restore CDs; you have to burn those yourself, using the supplied backup software that comes pre-loaded. Ah, but you can only do this after you’ve already customised a whole bunch of settings. So you can never truly put it “back to factory condition”. Sneaky!)

Anyway, apparently when I ordered it, the funding hadn’t actually been authorised yet. (I wasn’t told that.) And, apparently, it is now company policy to only buy Dell laptops. (Presumably because they’re the most over-priced ones on the market…) As a result of this, my boss (the guy who told me to go ahead with the purchase in the first place) decided that we would pretend the Compaq didn’t exist, and go purchase a Dell with the newly authorised funding.

So, I went to the Dell website and tried to get a price. For the model that HQ told us to get, you pay about £800 for a machine of inferior specification. (Slower CPU and less RAM.) Loathingly, we purchased it. (Needless to say, this required setting up a new business account with Dell, because our usual supplier doesn’t sell anything so lame.)

Dell came back to us with an estimated delivery date 1 week into the future. (Hmm… Our usual supplier delivers within 24 hours.)

A week came and went. And then I got another email from Dell. Apparently they can’t source a part… But they’re working to fulfil our order as quickly as possible… And they gave us a new delivery date.

One month into the future.

Long story short: One month has now been and gone.

To summarise: Dell have charged as twice as much for a machine of inferior specification, and they can’t even ****ing deliver it.

What kind of ripoff artists are these people?!

I’m really not amused with Dell. Our normal suppliers could have provided us with a higher specification laptop for half the price and had in on our door within 24 hours. In fact, they did! But HQ have told us we can’t do that, and now we have to pretend that this perfectly good laptop doesn’t exist, and play silly games with this useless amature “Dell” company…

Rant end.