I Bought a Dell

Last week I noted I might need a new computer. I made the purchase this weekend. I bought a Dell.

The one that had lasted for six years was also a Dell. I have noted that most businesses that send folks out with laptops send them out with Dells. They seem to be the workhorse computer, sort of like IBM used to be.

One thing I like about a new Dell is that there is not so many add-ons. HPs in particular come crammed with all kinds of things you don't want or need. It is a relief to find a fairly clean hard drive.

I always do a clean install of my programs instead of copying over from the old computer. I personally think it makes the machines run better and usually I have accumulated a lot of things that I really don't need. I save my documents and pictures to an external drive and go from there.

Setting up a new computer that way can be quite time consuming, however. One must reenter all passwords, and all bookmarks are lost, and sometimes programs you may have downloaded five years ago and used frequently are no longer available, or are now available at a huge price.

Of course, many things are now "in the cloud" so I really don't have to do much with emails, etc. However, I am not one to put my documents "in the cloud" because I consider my things to be private.

Amazing how we trust a big company, set out to do only one thing - make a profit - with all of our personal documents and pictures, but we don't trust the government to do a single thing. I think this is weird. Why would you trust either one? Frankly, I trust the government more. At least it offers the illusion of accountability through the voting process.

So anyway, I don't use the Microsoft OneDrive much (their document cloud) and I doubt I use the free cloud space Dell offered for a year (mostly because then next year I'd have to pay for it). I also kept my MS Office 2007 and chose not to upgrade to the "subscription" service of Office 365. Why would I want to pay $100 a year for that? Ultimately I may have to, but only if I am still writing.

So far I like my new computer even if it does have Windows 8.1. Fortunately Windows 10 will be out next week and I am hoping that it will resolve some of the weirdness of Windows 8. Microsoft seems to offer a bad operating system every other upgrade, although I didn't think Vista was as bad as people made it out to be. Windows 8.1, though, is definitely confusing.

The sales person told me that they would not be upgrading Windows 8.1 computers in the store because Microsoft is offering a free Windows 10 upgrade for a year, so it will probably be Christmas before the stock catches up to Windows 10. If the sales person had said that I could buy a Windows 10 computer in three weeks, I might have waited, but that was not the case.

Buying a computer is worse than buying a car. There are too many choices and ultimately it came down to reliability and price. It helped that I didn't need anything but a tower, so that kept costs down.