See, I had to cancel a recent Dell order today, simply because of hilarity. I purchased a laptop with a bunch of custom options 3 days ago, and it's already shipped. The bag I ordered with it? It'll ship sometime near Halloween.

Whoops.

Ya, there is a chocolate tourmaline shortage right now. Those poor tourmaline farmers :/

Shut up.

gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay

I got a Targus satchel-style laptop bag once. Cost me $70. Wore the hell out of my back and shoulder.

Then I went to Wal-Mart and spent $20 on a backpack with two strong padded straps and a padded inner zip-up pouch for my 17" Vaio. Couldn't be happier unless it had a battery pack and internal air conditioning.

I hope you are prepared for your computer to crap out on you just after the warranty expires. Dell is a bad, bad, bad, bad computer maker. Did I mention they are bad?

Dude, you own a Dell! I'm sorry. ;)

Dells make very good laptops. They are priced just right, and you really can't make them on your own like a desktop.

So I wouldn't get a desktop from dell; but a laptop, very much would.

I'm sorry, I can't hear any of you over the quiet sound of my Powerbook running as well as it did when I bought it two years ago.

Joe:
I'm sorry, I can't hear any of you over the quiet sound of my Powerbook running as well as it did when I bought it two years ago.

Too bad it and all of its accessories are over priced. :P

Seriously, where I work, we sell the power adapters to these things. It's hard enough to find a Powerbook adapter now, but their cost at an academic discount? Christ.

Honestly, I'd like Apple a lot more if their prices were somewhere along the line of "reasonable".

As for Dell, they're not horrible, but they aren't great either. I ended up getting myself an Everex laptop, and the only issues I've had are the international keyboard (which I've adapted to quite well) and the fact that nVidia has horrid driver support. Other than that, fantastic machine.

Wish it had an extra gig of RAM, though. :/

I paid $30 for my replacement adapter. But yeah, it was pricey. Then again, for a laptop at the time with a dedicated 3-D card and comparable processor/media/features, I doubt I paid a lot more.

I paid $30 for my replacement adapter.

Was it third party? Because all of the Apple brand power adapters we have at discount are between $70-$120, depending on what you're getting.

Here, let me lay out why I say Dell is horrible. My wife bought a Dell as she entered law school, nearly three years ago. Within three months (just as the warranty was expiring) the wireless card was not working properly and its drivers were causing blue screen crashes, its CD drive wouldn't eject, and then the hard drive developed a serious problem that meant the computer couldn't even be formatted properly. We notified Dell of these problems before the warranty expired, they sent a new hard drive, but the new hard drive, fresh out of the box, had the same problem as the old one, while it was being delivered the warranty expired, and they refused to do any further troubleshooting without us paying them several hundred dollars.

I could go on with the horror stories, but yes, in my personal experience, they are a very bad company with very bad customer service. Their moderately acceptable if your a corporate customer, however.

Since then, I warn people far far away, can't help it. :P

Chilango, that sort of case-point scenario is fun to read, but says next to nothing as you'll find that type of horror story with every company ever. When that sort of thing is happening to like, 10% of people, then yes, I'll acknowledge it as an argument.

I know the the plural of anecdote is not data, but fundamentally I was trying to explain the hostility I expressed earlier as not just random fanboy fapping, or somesuch. And since then I've asked around, and it seems like alot of the people I know have had problems, again, each one is an anecdote, but it keeps building up, if you will. That and the fact that my main complaint was about the customer service, who basically told me "No, you have no option but to pay us more money to fix this mistake that is our fault." and that makes *sense* within the context that Dell's customer service has been widely panned, and that comparisons made by official reviewers of such things have not been all that good. (mind you, customer service *always* seems to become a problem to computer companies sooner or later, but there's "annoying" and "enraging", Dell fell into the latter..)

In short, my summary is that *if* something goes wrong with a Dell and your not a corporate customer, the likelyhood is that you are SOL. Since things go wrong sooner or later...