Call Me a Hypocrite: Dell Inspiron 1720

Everybody that knows me can tell you how I badmouth Dell. "Don't buy Dell", I always say, "Unless you are buying a monitor. All their stuff is junk."

So today, I spent 1400 +tax on a Dell Inspiron laptop. Yes, I am a hypocrite.

I have owned a Dell 24" widescreen LCD monitor for about a year and a half, and I love it. I mean, I really love it. It's the best LCD monitor I have ever looked at. So, I have faith in their ability to build a nice LCD monitor. (Or, rather, I have faith in the Samsung TFTs behind their monitors...)

I don't have much faith, however, in their ability to build a decent computer. I work with Dell computers and servers a lot at my day job, and they are constantly breaking down. Customers call all the time when the RAID alarm goes off on their servers due to a card or drive dying. Their workstations seem to die randomly, and require replacement or repair regularly. Our own employees curse their old Dell laptops with such venom that they scare schoolchildren in the next county.

So how did I come to want to purchase a Dell laptop? Well, it was a combination of things. The first, and most important, is that I have talked with a few people who own the newer Inspiron series of laptops. They have all had positive experiences so far. Secondly, most of the reviews are positive. Thirdly, this series contains no exploding nuclear laptop batteries. And lastly, and also of great importance, nobody could build me a laptop with the specs I wanted for under 2,000 dollars except Dell.

I priced out IBuyPower.com, CyberPowerPc.com, Falcon Northwest, Alienware, HP, Sony, Toshiba, Lenovo, and Acer. Nobody came close to the deal I could get from Dell, (Amusing, since Dell owns Alienware...) except CyberPower PC, and they seem to garner massive amounts of negative reviews. (Cyberpower, if you guys want to prove the negativity wrong, send me a review system. You can reach me at agent_X7@mmorpg.com)

So now I have a shiny, green Inspiron 1720 laptop being built at Dell. I may have spent a ton of money on this, but I am taking consolation in the fact that I will be reviewing this laptop for MMORPG.com, so if it sucks, people will hear about it. (And also, it's a tax writeoff, w00t!)