Dell has always had me wary. Proprietary power supplies. Their own idea of form factor. Bloatware. Funky cooling methods. Minimal bios/uefi settings. Great for the guys and gals who need a pc and are blinded by the cool cases.
And folks making the likes of the Nvidia 4XXX GPU's ditching warranty claims because of rampant melted power ports, seemingly poor pcie port mechanical fortitude.
Don't believe me? Northridge Fix and better yet. Northwest Repair on YouTube may change your thoughts.
Linus Tech Tips is always slapping together robust desktops for their own guys.
And they benchmark them. Cinebench, Furmark. So does Northwest Repair as a defacto standard when testing GPU repairs.
We had a discussion of your preferred OS and the applications that you've become accustomed to using.
And a bit of reluctance to adapt to newer versions. Nothing says you can't upgrade your hardware to something that surpasses what you're used to using and install an older OS of your choice and keep rocking on.
When you go rogue with Windows versions that bypass obsolescence and all of the crap that you'll never use.
Or install the features and services, etc. on demand. Well. There are ways.
Sometimes just a good washing out of the cpu socket, ram sockets. And repasting the heat sink(s) works wonders.
But for God sakes stay away from any "liquid metal" heat sink compound. I still use good old fashioned "Desitin" zinc white stuff that gets all over my fingers and clothes.
A bad coin cell. Drooping psu. Dirty port contacts. Maybe a failing graphics card or memory on it.
Or just plain old and beat motherboard with toasted capacitors in the power rail.
I have 2 store bought pc's. Both Asus. I don't know why. From owning Gigabyte, MSI, "name brand" boards with real good power supplies and top notch ram. I just keep using them. Although I do hear that their quality has degraded.
Crap like active lighting that the gamers live for. Haven't looked lately if they have business or server class main boards and components. Oh well.
I keep coming back to Asus. This laptop has cost me 2 batteries, a fan, slapped an SSD in it. A memory battery. Charger. Modded Win 11 that could care less if I have anything more than Secure Boot.
When did I get it? 5-6 years ago. And the other is a 'screamng' ROG gaming lappy.
You can't really call it a laptop unless you like your lap lobster red.
One request that I do get with Dell owners is to just wipe the damned thing clean. Get rid of the backup partittion.
And just install Windows. Just Windows only. No Dell this and Dell that. A few core applications, Show them where their previous backed-up stuff is located. Happy campers.
For me? You cannot beat a custom home built pc made with standard form factor components.
If you're all paranoid (or triple-noid) about "vulnerabilities", a "remote attacker", "exploits".
Stay the heck away from those sites (sights??). Get a good email client and use it. I use Thunderbird.
My ISP, Gmail, Yahoo email works just fine. Any garbage is captured very well. Rules, filters, sub folders. Easy.
You don't need 47 different virus and malware programs running and fighting each other. Be smart. You're a smart guy. I proved that straight away with a buddy who had been a believer of AVG, some other crap or years.
Draggy pc, slowdowns, laggy. Let Defender do it's job. And stay away from McAfee anything.
Installing a downloaded application? Custom install and see how much garbage they try to slip in past you.
my rant for the day.
kirk out.
