Delayed Dell

LG 22

As I mentioned before, it’s been over six years since my last home PC purchase and it’s been long overdue for a new one.  I think my registry is pretty much ‘borked’ with junk…enough junk where it slows my system startup to almost a crawl these days, and good luck trying to launch Outlook Express in under 2 minutes.  I even notice with around 768 RAM, I can’t usually have more than 2 programs open at a time without the PC taking its sweet time chnaging between programs.

So I ordered my XPS630 on Aug 28 and it was supposed to ship on September 5th.  Well, it didn’t.  My new ship date was updated until September 12th which of course bummed me out.  The thing is, I cannot figure out ‘why’ the delay, unless it was related to hurricane Gustav and getting parts out to TX (where Dell’s custom assembly plant is).

I called Dell on Sunday and requested more information on the delay.  I was a bit surprised when the lady told me it was the battery.  The battery?  What battery?  I didn’t order any UPS?  She asked me if I was getting a laptop?  A laptop?  Damn, I gave her my order number and everything and clearly I ordered no laptop.  Needless to say, now I’m getting a little skeptical.

She finally found the correct order and aplogized and said they would upgrade me to next day air.

Finally my PC shipped yesterday, the 8th, and on my online account it does indeed say ‘Next Day’, however, the tracking order is Ground, and as of this morning, it’s sitting in a FedEx center still in TX with a new estimated arrival date of this Friday, the 12th.

Don’t ask.  I have no idea.  But so far, while they didn’t screw up my order, but my Dell experience this time around is about a ‘B/B-‘ if I were to grade it.

In the meantime, Best Buy put its LG LCD monitors on sale.  I couldn’t resist the sale on the 22″, so I bought one which will indeed replace my 17″ this weekend.

Here’s the specs on the LG 2252:

• 2 ms response time.
• 10,000:1 contrast ratio; 300cd/m brightness.
• 1680 x 1050 resolution.
• DVI-D w/ HDCP input along with standard VGA input.
• 16:10 aspect ratio
• Energy Star compliance.

So I figure this weekend will be re-intsalling WoW, CoH/CoV, Quick Books, and email.

My new Dell is taking forever :<

Seriously, I ordered it on Aug 28th, and as of this morning, September 4th it is current status is still ‘in production’.

WTH?  We aren’t building Rome here or reinventing the wheel.  It’s a mid system at best with no major bells or whistles.  For all intents and purposes, it’s pretty much a stock rig for the XP630’s.  I’ll change it up after the fact when I get it.

What’s worse is the estimated ship date is tomorrow with an esitmated receive date of the 10th thru the 12th.  Basically two weeks.  Yeah, maybe it sounds like I’m being overly picky on Dell, but the build time seems exceptionally long compared to the previous two I have purchased from them before.

Dude, I’m getting a Dell

Coming to my own personal Azeroth soon.

So I finally plunked down the cash after over a year of putting it off on buying a new Dell computer.

This will be my third Dell, as I purchased one for my father about 3 years ago, and my personal PC is now approaching six years old, if not actually older.  Overall, I’ve had good luck with Dell PC’s and I always stick with the minimum 1 yr warranty (I don’t undertsand paying so much for the 2 – 3 year extended warranties, since I’m not a PC novice anyway).

I’ve built my own computers before.  I’m even A+ certified, but really…I have no desire right now to buy things piece-meal anymore and configure and build and cross my fingers.  Sure for a few extra bucks, I’d like something to work right out the box anymore.

My current PC is a Dell 4550 Pentium 4, 1.9 GHz with 712MB Ram, and a 6GB (yes, six) hard drive.  I’ts been slowing down the last few years, despite how clean I try and make all my installs and what not.  I’m sure the registry has a lot of abandoned keys, and there are some start up programs I haven’t used in years.  I basically play WoW on it now and gave up play CoH strictly because of slow load times and disk caching.

I have some family pics, some business docs, personal papers, and mostly MP3’s.  So after 6 years, I’m not up to a full 6GB.  You can’t even buy a computer today with anything less than 250-300 GB hard drives today.

So my new rig is far from being top of the line.  I am on a somewhat of a budget, but at this stage of the game, anything today will blow my current system out of the water.  Since I plan on only playing games on it and never watching movies or hooking my TV up to it, I don’t want….or need…the ultimate entertainment machine.  Besides, I still have my 360 and Wii for gaming.

Here’s my new rig:  a red bezzeled XPS630, 750 watts, 320GB HD, Core 2 Q6600 (8MB L2 cache) , 2GB DDR2 SDRAM @800MHz, 2.4 GHz, 1066FSB and a nVidia 512 MB GeForce 8800, 7.1 surround sound.  And that is probably a minimum spec’d mid-range 630.

I’ll probably upgrade my monitor as well, but at a different time.  My current LG 15″ LCD is okay for now…but I’d like to get a 19-20″ in a few months.

The biggest task will be re-installing CoH & CoV, WoW and getting all the updates along with them.  Plus changing to my gaming keyboard and installing all my extras like my printer, but now that I plunked down the money, I’m totally psyched to get it in about two weeks.  There may be a day of hooky coming up soon as all this will take quite a bit off time to do.

Games I’m looking forward to: WoW Wrath of the Lich King, Spore, Diablo III for starters.