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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Windows vs Ubuntu: in a nutshell

Monday, July 19th, 2010

You may recall how Dell dug itself into an almighty hole last month, after proclaiming that Ubuntu was safer than Windows, before swiftly changing its mind and declaring itself more neutral than Switzerland.

Well, now the PC maker’s had time to think the matter through, another page has appeared on the Dell website, condensing the whole Windows vs Ubuntu debate into about 100 words.

From Dell’s perspective the choice is clear. You should choose Windows if (and I swear I’m not paraphrasing here):

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Guide to the Dell Streak in screenshots

Friday, July 16th, 2010

As we mentioned in our Dell Streak review, this isn’t yet a perfect machine – but there’s also a lot to like, particularly when it comes to the way Dell has taken advantage of the larger screen. In this guide, I’ll quickly run through all the major screens (and a few apps for luck) to give an insight into what you’ll get if you do choose to buy the Streak.

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Extreme handwriting recognition on the Dell Latitude XT2

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

This is my first and possibly only handwritten blog entry…

that’s because ‘an in a cramped airplane._ seat and the ride is d little bumpy. that, and everyone who can see what lam dough watching me avidly’ The XT2 uses windows7 pen extensions and as a long ten fan of the concept of pen computing I touchscreens and the business of handwriting instead of keyboarding.

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First Look: Dell PowerEdge R510 rackmount server

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Announced last Friday, a Dell PowerEdge R510 mid to low-end rackmount server has landed with a light-ish thud in my corporate testbed facility. I might be joking about the corporate testbed, but I’m not joking about the lightness: having just seen the bruises fade away after shifting my stock of HP LP2000Rs (by donating them to the London Cycle Campaign), it was a major relief to be able to carry and unpack the R510 without cups of tea for the battered-shins posse, cursing, and fresh dents in the back of the estate car.

Comparing the R510 with the old machines is hard, because the simple physical similarity wrongfoots you when you actually absorb the statistics. I gave away 5 LP2000R’s – the virtual machine images of them all would fit, and run, inside the R510 without complaint, and use rather less than half of the current required by just one LP2000R.

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Meet the Adamo XPS… from Apple?

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Regular readers of our reviews section will know we drooled all over Dell’s Adamo a few weeks back. Its metal slab design, superb build quality and all-round bloody loveliness won over most of the PC Pro crew and even elicited reluctantly positive grunts from several of MacUser’s troops too.

So what’s this Dell is now teasing? (Click to enlarge)

Puzzlingly, it’s a new 9.99mm-thin Adamo XPS laptop that looks remarkably like a MacBook Air. (more…)

Dell goes up to Eleven

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

A briefing this week from Dell, which has started down the path pioneered by IBM, in retreating further away from hardware sales and tentatively towards various methods of consulting for businesses.

The company wanted you to hear about its pre-virtualisation check, done entirely remotely. It wanted to pass on the news about its new smaller business servers – T400 and T710 – which are decently configured for VMware and Hyper-V, and made a point of mentioning its next-generation remote management card, which will update drivers and patches for you as they are announced.

I’m writing this at some speed, just after the end of its embargo period, though to be perfectly honest I couldn’t see any Big Secrets being let out of the bag. When I asked the questions that PC Pro is getting a bit of a reputation for, about how Dell’s remote access services would be legally defined to protect the client’s data and help to disclose exactly where the team of consultants furtling round your servers, are based… then I got a few simple, honest ‘don’t knows’.

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First look: Dell Adamo 13

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

I caught a glimpse of the Dell Adamo concept design at a pre-Christmas briefing last year, where Dell was so nervous about security they banned our phones (little realising that my faithful HTC Touch’s camera is barely worthy of the name).

So it was with some pleasure that I could finally get my hands on a production model at Dell’s Versailles-based event today. And I have to say, it’s a very impressive piece of kit. (more…)

Time for Microsoft to name its Windows 7 price

Monday, May 18th, 2009

A few months before the launch of Vista, a very senior person at Acer spilled the beans to me in a one-on-one press briefing held in Taipei, that Acer was going public with its criticism of the Vista pricing model, and that it felt it had no choice but to swallow the cost for putting Vista Home Premium onto its products rather than Vista Home Basic. Apparantly, Home Basic was the same cost as XP Home, and Vista Home Premium was some $20 more. (more…)