The computing relics unearthed in the PC Pro Labs

Tuesday, December 27th, 2011

The PC Pro Lab is a dark, dingy place full of cardboard boxes, benchmarks and more motherboards, processors and PCs than we care to count, but it’s also home to a variety of kit that’s slipped through the net –  some of it even dating back to before PC Pro launched in 1994.

From iconic machines like the IBM PC to the silliness of Sony’s £1,190 netbook, we’ve scoured the darkest corners and blown dust off some of the oldest, oddest and rarest kit we can find – starting with a true icon of the industry. (more…)

Dell’s misleading graphics card buying advice

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

Dell should be commended for going out of its way to help novice PC buyers, but its entry for choosing a graphics card — accessible by clicking the “Help me choose” link when customising various Optiplex models — contains a glaring and potentially expensive error, as spotted by Reddit users.

While the text is basic, it’s accurate enough for beginners. Instead, it’s the image that contains a dangerous chunk of misinformation.

The monitor on the left, labelled as a PC that uses a “standard graphics card”, is displaying a Windows desktop that’s washed out and blurry. The seemingly identical Dell TFT on the right, powered by a “high-end graphics card”, is showing the same desktop – but this time it’s much sharper and more vivid. They’re both outputting at the same resolution. (more…)

The everyday computing behind F1

Friday, September 9th, 2011

It’s properly, seriously hot here at Monza. This is, many would say, the most theatrical of the Formula 1 weekends and in the 30-plus degree heat, there’s a vast amount of technology on show. Most of it’s related to making cars go round at over 200mph, and this is the province of items like a solid tungsten nose-weight, or a £200,000 steering wheel — and that’s what you’ll hear about when the big TV stations walk around the pit lanes or chat with the drivers and managers.

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Dell claims its customer support has improved by 90% – do you agree?

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

Customer support is about as sexy as cauliflower cheese, but anyone who’s suffered a bad experience will know just how infuriating it can be. What’s even worse is when it appears that companies just don’t care, which is why my hellishly early interview with Tim Griffin this morning – who has overall responsibility for Dell’s global customer support – was so welcome.

For a start, it’s refreshing that Dell is so open to the fact that its support hasn’t always been great. “We’ve obviously not fared too well in your own surveys over the past couple of years,” Griffin said, referring to PC Pro’s annual reliability and service survey, “and it’s something we’re very cognisant of.”

(I’ll interrupt myself here to say that if you haven’t already taken part – and we do rely on a huge number of responses to make our results significant – then you have just over a week to do so. And you’ll be in with a chance of winning one of our £4,500-worth of prizes too.) (more…)

How much datacenter does $1 billion buy?

Friday, April 15th, 2011

Dell brought together a rich mixture of hacks and industry faces for a big announcement recently. It wasn’t a single product – no new laptop, no box to kick – but rather a whole slew of announcements that boil down to the simple statement that Dell wants to be a cloud provider in its own right. It has a huge preconfigured stack of servers, storage, switching and power which it can wheel into your datacenter on demand, called vStart, which takes care of the private cloud.

If that wasn’t quite enough for you then how about splashing out a billion dollars on cloud hosting centres? In the spirit of one of my all-time favourite books (the Tiger That Isn’t), I was minded to ask, almost the instant the announcement came from the lips of Brian Jones, head of public and large enterprise from Dell USA: a billion dollars, wow, but how much is that, really?

The money is going on datacenters. There are at least 10 candidate locations, though the Japanese earthquake has made the location of at least one the subject of one of those rushed sentences you can tell the speaker would rather you didn’t notice.  And some of the decision-making on locations for these centres has been about things that hardcore datacenter techies don’t like to see themselves bothered by, such as the legal position over government or company data and whether it can be moved outside the country it came from. A billion dollars spread across ten centres is $100m a centre (I worked that out on my own you know!) and that set me thinking: how big is a big datacenter these days?

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The next killer smartphone feature: a decent battery

Friday, March 18th, 2011

I got an Amazon Kindle for Christmas. I charged it for only the third time yesterday, despite using it almost every day. In fact, my only problem with the Kindle is remembering where I left the charger several weeks ago.

Similarly, I can’t remember the last time I ran out of juice on my laptop. Until a couple of years ago, I could barely complete a train journey home without peering at the Windows battery meter and praying the laptop didn’t abruptly conk out mid-way through a match in Football Manager (I do work on the train sometimes, in case my publisher is reading).

Yet, with the extended battery pack on my Dell XPS M1330, the battery lasts about three or four hours – plenty long enough to get me to and from the office. And by today’s standards, that’s even starting to look pretty feeble. The 13in MacBook Pro lasted for in excess of 10 hours in our light-use battery tests, for example. Like the Kindle, it’s practically reached the point where you barely need to worry about the battery.

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Dell Streak 7 review: first look

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Hot on the heels of Dell announcing the Streak 7, I was able to get my hands on the device itself. There’s much to like here, but is it really the 7in tablet the world has been waiting for?

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Dell Inspiron Duo review: first look

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

We’re used to thinking of Dell as a supplier of PCs that are so reliably dull you can buy them without seeing them. The new Dell Inspiron Duo breaks that tradition. It’s a netbook that you really need to get your hands on, so that you can feel its smoothly rounded contours, swivel its screen to turn it into a tablet, and drop it into its inviting dock. If Dell sells the Duo at retail, it’s the sort of thing that should do well at the better department stores, such as John Lewis. It might even pull a few buyers away from the Apple iPad.

The Duo is a convertible netbook with a twist. Normally, to convert a laptop into a tablet, you rotate the whole screen on a hinge before folding it over the keyboard. Instead, the Duo’s screen swivels inside the lid. This is very quick and easy to do, and there’s a hint of magic about it. The screen has to be connected to the motherboard somehow, but the Duo hides it completely. It’s smoother and quicker than the only similar system I’ve tried, a Vadem Clio smart netbook from 1999.

The Duo also has a third set of capabilities as an entertainment centre. Drop the tablet into its JBL Audio Station dock and it works as a digital picture frame, movie player, Skype video phone and bedside alarm clock. It also would look good in the living room, or on an executive desk. More than anything, the Duo comes across as an attractive and functional appliance, almost to the point where you stop thinking about the electronics inside, or even the price.

Fortunately, the Duo is competitive in both areas.

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Just how big was Dell’s cookie jar?

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

The money sloshing around some companies is rather hard to imagine. I can wrap my poverty-stricken mind around £1 million in lottery winnings easy enough, but once you get into the billions I  have no idea what that means.

So the US Security and Exchange Commission’s 61-page document detailing the exclusivity deal between Dell and Intel made for mind-blowing reading (I suggest you start at page 10, that’s when it gets good). At one point, 76% of Dell’s quarterly operating income came from Intel, via lump sum payments and a rebate system designed to keep the PC maker from offering AMD chips in its computers.

That’s a head-turning, “that can’t be right” sort of statistic. That’s $723 million in one quarter alone. One quarter. Three months. That’s more than $8 million a day, just to keep Dell “monogamous.” I’d stay loyal for that much, that’s for sure.

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Dell bumps Apple to ship world’s most expensive RAM

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Dell has knocked Apple off one pedestal this week. Last year, we highlighted how an upgrade from 4GB RAM to 8GB RAM on the 17in MacBook Pro would cost a whopping £839 — over £200 a gigabyte.

Dell’s Mobile Precision M6500 manages to top that.

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