My Old Dell

Article = none , personal experiance


I suppose I should put in something about my old clunker from dell.

Hmm.... it runs well.
Well... I stripped out , sabataged ,and disabled the pre-installed anti-virus anti spam software (which wanted lots of money) and installed the free windows defender anti virus , and I use the built in windows fire wall (again , free of charge)

I pretty much never (very rarely) use Internet Explorer, its either Firefox or Opera (I have both).

Dell sold my personal info to Sympatico who kindly signed me up for their internet service and then told me about it after the fact, thanks Dell. Two hours on the phone to cancel a service I never wanted and never asked for in the first place. But ... thats not the machine, thats the people behind the machine.

My one and only call to tech support left them floundering thinking there was a problem with the speakers, and generally totally clueless (turned out the usb mouse was in the middle of dying, 10$ replacement fixed it right up , but that was *ME* figuring it out , not them). But it did keep some people in India employed. I even got to speak to a supervisor and everything. Why I got transfered to a super I have no idea , I can't remember asking for it , and in the middle of her telling me everything was hunky dory now when it turned out it was not she transfered me right back to the techie to keep on trying, but hey , I kept two people on the other side of the world employed. (Notice I didn't use the word "gainfully" there ... )

I voided the warrenty by upgrading the video card so it could play my games. Plays them well.

It's never caught a virus. Or a Trojen. But I stay off the Internet Explorer. And I don't download files , screen savers , cool not so "free free free ! how can you go wrong it's free !!!" programs, things like that.

I have a word processor and a spread sheet program. They're both from the free software foundation (Abi Word , and Gnumeric) which kindly put out windows versions
of the things and gave them away free of charge.

Sometimes I run the netstat command in a dos window and monitor it for a while while I'm doing other things, just to see whats on my machine that's reaching out to the net. Usually all I see are the Local Host entries , meaning my machine is chatting with itself and no one else. (the 1394 network connection you see is for internal use, not for connecting to the internet) So I know there's nothing sneaking around behind my back. (dos prompt , netstat 30 , will run it every 30 seconds automatically and let you watch ..hopefully , a lot of quietness. If it's a hot bed of activity on your machine , you're probably in trouble)

So what do I think of my dell ? Well... It can be coaxed into being a good machine. If you spend time , and effort , and you have technical knowledge.

Dell Dimension DE051
Celeron CPU 2.53 GHz
1GB Ram
NVidia GeForce FX5500
(256mb video card)