Got a new Dell “home” catalog today… Its as random as ever… a dozen laptops, a dozen desktops. No coherency among product lines. Reading some of the fine print:

Dell’s Return Policy: If you cancel your purchase for any reason within 21 days, we’ll refund your purchase price minus shipping and handling and applicable restocking charges. You are responsible for the cost of shipping your system back to us.

Warranties: You can get a copy of our limited warranties and guarantees by writing Dell USA L.P., Att: Warranties, One Dell Way Round Rock TX 78762. To purchase warranty only or for more information on other service options, please call 1-800-915-3355 or visit dell4me.com/termsandconditions

And I thought this was an interesting technical note:

Shared Memory on Select Dell Dimension, Inspiron and XPS systems:
Up to 512MB of system memory may be alocated to support integrated graphics, depending on the system memory size and other factors (Dim. C521 and E521, up to 512MB, Dim E520, XPS, M1210 and 210, Insp. E1405, E1505, and E1705, up to 224MB, Insp. 1501, up to 256MB)

To paraphrase a well-known technical curmudgeon “we read the fine print so you don’t have to”.

1. Dell used to have a 30-day no questions asked return policy. Clearly this has now been reduced to 21 days, and you may end up paying an applicable restocking charge of how much? If you return a machine, I’d be surprised if the return shipping, fees and restocking are less than $100US.

2. They don’t publish their warranties in the catalog, because they are mostly legalize designed to protect the company and the customer be damned.

3. If you think you have 2 gigs of memory in your machine, you may only have 1.5 gigs of “useful” memory, as a chunk of it is going to the video board.

Note that these gems appear on two full pages, A14 and A15 of similar legal ass-covering.

Same old story.

I’ve purchased thousands of dollars worth of APC uninterruptible power supplies over the years, I really like them, and consider this to be a default brand.

But two-three years after purchasing one, you need to consider replacing the batteries. The consequences of not replacing the battery smell bad; when the battery cells break down, circuits get shorted out, and you get a burning smell.

So…latest and greatest is one we purchased three years ago from Dell. Turns out it is an APC 2U rack mount Smart UPS, with a Dell part number. The “replace battery” light has gone on. After some investigation, the online manuals suggest that this happens two months or so before the battery needs to be replaced.

My first attempt to order a replacment from PC Connection fails. I got the 1400 VA size correct, but a 2U UPS has skinny little batteries that lie on their side, and they are actually enclosed in a sort of drawer that slides out of the UPS.

Like the good citizen I am, I attempt to use APC’s web-based tools to determine the correct part number and item. (When you are ordering batteries to be shipped, the cost adds up.) How is the the customer experience screwed up? Let me count the ways.

1. Even though this is a recent unit, the model number does not appear on the web site.
2. Even though the model number starts with DL (for Dell…get it?) the model number does not appear, although there are several other similar part numbers.
3. If you try to send an eMail, through the form, the eMail form bombs
4. If you try to to the “online chat”…the chat doesn’t work (nobody is at home…even during both normal business hours eastern time, as well as evening hours and weekends eastern time.
5. After you try the chat, and it says nobody is available to chat, the third time finally allowed me to send an eMail.
6. To India. The kind person was sorry, but he wasn’t able to answer my question, but he would send this to his supervisor.
7. Who didn’t exist, or didn’t write back, or whatever… (I waited a week).

The story does have a happy end, and a suggestion.
Avoid steps 1-8 ENTIRELY. Just call the battery replacement hotline at 1(800)300-7141. Within five minutes, a cheerful, competant person will tell you that the thing you are looking fir is called an RBC-24. with a suggested retail price of $259.95 (Although it did take a few minutes because he said “the system is slow today”.) Bingo.

First there was Asterisk, which allowed you to create your own home or office telephone system. Now there is Fab@Home, a 3-D printer that allows you to fabricate parts that you have designed in a 3-D CAD program. Their home page has news about the project, as well as movies and photos.

With a stunningly cavalier attitude, my preparation for the daylight savings time issue consisted of checking the Microsoft web site, which led me to believe that as as long as everything was updated with patches, the change would be automatic. Today, checking for daylight savings issues, I had mixed results.

• Unless you update and patch your Windows XP and Server 2003 machines, all bets are off. Even once they are updated, you may find yourself an hour later or early.
• Workstations may take the time from a domain server, but if they don’t, you can reset them from the Time application in Control Panel, or by right-clicking the displayed time in the system tray.
• Jeff Duntemann has a note about a free program that will do the update, and explains a bit more how the daylight-savings changes are stored in the registry.
• As long as the Grandstream IP phones were set to account for daylight savings, they all flipped over without intervention. They update themselves from NIST.

Prompted by an entry over on Jeff Dunteman’s Contrapositive Diary, (scroll down past the fluffy dogs…) I have been I’ve been watching with interest some eBay sales in the $250, range for Dell Optiplexes. I just saw an SX270 Pentium 4 3.2 Mhz with 512 K of RAM and Window XP Professional Service Pack 2 go for $255.00. This is a small notebook sized unit. Even with $40.00 shipping it still seems to be pretty interesting. As Jeff mentions, these were going for $1800 or more just a couple years ago. Little guys like these are ideal for mini servers or media center PCs.

Other low-end machines seem to be going for $150.00 and under. Many times you’ll see that they have things like 10 gigabyte hard drives; you have to wonder if perhaps the parts have been diddled. (a technical term for “swapped out with junk lying around on the bench…”) But, say, you find one with a 2.4Ghz processor, and 256Kb or maybe 512Kb of RAM and a 20 gig hard drive. Install kubuntu for an operating system and desktop applications. Total cost $300.00?

For the past few years, PC hardware has been relatively static. Each new generation of hardware brought only incremental performance improvements. I’m still using 2.8Ghz processors in my office machines (both refurbs as is my Dell laptop), and servers are using slower processors. I’d recommend avoiding the Intel Celeron processors, but Pentium 4s at 2.4Ghz and up still have legs, especially with Linux.

The new Windows Vista wants to see more of everything; duel core processors and two gigs of RAM will help it on its way. But that means recent hardware that led up to Vista is both a bargain, and viable for the medium term, when matched with Windows XP Service Pack 2. If I was looking to round out my office with a couple new machines, and I had more time than money, I’d check eBay and the Dell Outlet for refurbished desktop machines. Look at the Optiplex line especially.