Loaded Question... Dell or Compaq

[kingtbone]

I find Dell are great in a corporate environment. The machines are solid, price friendly, and their support is excellent compared to most of the market. I'm not sure how they do on servers or home machines, but they are my recommendation for corporate workstations.

[Fierce]

Dude, go for the Dell!

I agree with Everybody else, Dell's for the workstations, and Compaq's for the servers. (As I type this from a Compaq workstation! )

[JasonNesmith]

You may want to look at what MicronPC has to offer. Their systems are open and easy to support, plus tech support from MicronPC is pretty good too. MicronPC even has a line of AMD based machines, though a very small line.

[RejectionMan]

Dell all the way.

Out worksations area l some flavor of optiplex. Servers are all power edge (except the AS/400s). Why? Becasue hte Suppor tis outstanding,in 4hours we have it fixed, or a new system. No fuss no muss. The IT department only deals with users, and softwere, hardware is totaly covered by dell.

NO to IBM, we dumped them becausthe service is crap. and compaq.... to propritory.

[KINGofBLEH]

DELL = RETAIL CUSTOMERS
COMPAQ = CORPORATE CUSTOMERS

One thing you dont want to ignore (especially if you are a large company) is the PC company's ability to support the PCs across the enterprise. I'm not talking about 1 yr vs 3 yr warranties, etc. In a large company you can pitch all that. Your PC provider should support you no matter how old the machine is. Also, your PC vendor should be able to help you recover from your worst disaster scenarios. Ask yourself, "Will (Dell or Compaq) be able to help me if 25% of my PCs go down at once?"

I work for a large company (150,000+ employees & PCs & several thousand servers). Compaq is our 95% exclusive vendor for desktops and servers and they have done a pretty good job supporting our equipment. They treat us like they would want to be treated.

I worked with Dell with a predecessor company and they treated us like we just walked in off the street. Their tenure was very short as a result.

As far as quality of the actual machines, its pretty much a wash. Compaq has proprietary crap like BIOS on the HDD and cases that look like they were designed by baby chimps. But Dell has some minuses too like single drive IDE channels, poor air flow in cases and poor driver support. Both are about equally painful.

In a horse race, I would say Compaq by a nose (support).

If you REALLY want quality, stable equipment go with IBM. I have some 5-6 year old 300gl's that I am still using today at work. Never had a prob. Only prob is that you can expect to pay 10-25% higher for IBM label.

[craigmodius]

Well thanks guys that pretty much sums up what I had alredy figured. I just haven't had experience on recent Compaq workstations. Though we have a few nice Compaq servers (Proliant)in place as well as a few Dells (Poweredge)

I have dealt with recent Dells(optiplex, dimensions etc.) and found their support to be OK.

And this is just a small 120 or so node network.

Thanks again.

[imaeditedbysowulo]

If your workstations are Dell, you might want to talk to your Dell sales rep about becoming Dell certified. It only costs about $150, once you are certified you no longer have to deal with calling them on the phone for warranty parts. You just go to their website, fill out some info and the next morning you have your warranty part.

[Cleetus]

Definetly Dell, I have all IBM's now. They aren't too bad, but I just thought that the Dell service was much better, and they got a cool commercial dude.