OK, officially pissed off at Dell.

I know there are a lot of folks out there who hate Dell, but having used their products for over 15 years both at work and at home, and only having had one machine arrive DOA that they couldn't fix even when a tech came to the office to work on it (which machine, as a result, they then promptly replaced with a brand-new one), and having never had any other problem with a Dell machine that I couldn't fix myself, I frankly can't bring myself to hate them.

After the disaster that was my first laptop (a Toshiba Satellite), I have bought Dell laptops since 2001 and never looked back. I am on my fourth Dell laptop and Sally is on her first and looking to buy a second.¹ We also have two Dell desktops in the family, one is Sally's and one is my mother's. Both of them are eight years old and are still kicking without any issues (except of course for the trojans and viruses I have to wipe off of Mom's from time to time...sigh). I have continually tried to prevent friends and family alike from buying anything but Dell...sometimes I have succeeded, other times the big box consumer electronics displays were too much for easily-distracted minds.²

The other half-dozen machines I run here (including my own main workstation) are Frankenmachines that I built myself, mostly with Intel or Gigabyte motherboards and about half and half AMD vs. Intel processors. Well, I also have a couple of HP DL380 G2s and an HP DL360 G1 sitting here, but they don't get run very often because they make too much flippin' noise.

OK, that out of the way, here's why I am now officially pissed off at Dell. I am trying to spec a new laptop for Sally that will run Windows 7. We don't want to spend a lot of money and frankly she needs the laptop primarily to write papers and do research for her grad program, surf the web, and play her Facebook games. She doesn't want a big heavy laptop like my 17" Precision M4300 monster, she just wants a 14" machine that weighs under or right at 5 pounds.

So this puts us into Inspiron 14r territory.³ All well and good.

Except that she'd like one with a pink case, and the one I can get inexpensively with a pink case comes ONLY with 2GB RAM. They have another one that is practically identical, has 4GB RAM, costs $20 more and promises "quick ship!"...BUT DOESN'T HAVE A COLOR OPTION.

What I'm noticing as I have spent a couple of hours looking at various Dell laptops is that you have almost no choices left on hardware options. Yeah, if you get into the expensive desktop replacement workstations, you have more options. But the consumer-grade laptops -- even when purchased through the small business portal -- are extremely limited in what you can configure.

I mean, for example: Go here. Look at the two 14r's on the left (which are the ones I'm talking about above). There is no difference between the physical machines and there is no particularly good reason why the 2GB machine couldn't have an option for 3GB or 4GB RAM.

I do understand (I think) why the second machine (the "quick ship!" one) doesn't offer the color choice -- they have these machines already built and boxed up and ready to ship. That's fair, I suppose.

But apparently the first machine is also already built except for its color panels and nobody is available to pop open the memory door and toss in another 2GB of DDR3. Or any other option you might prefer, like a bigger hard drive or a different wireless card. (The machine does not appear to have Bluetooth, which is a fairly big surprise in this day and age.)

Which, in this economy, I suppose is how Dell is coping with the cost of doing business...BUT IT STILL PISSES ME OFF.⁴

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¹ The one we bought for her two years ago won't support Windows 7, which is somewhere between being Dell's fault and being my fault -- it does support Vista, which made me assume that it would also support Windows 7 at release, but Dell has not seen fit to release any drivers for Windows 7, and they only have 32-bit Vista drivers for it anyway so I can't go that route.
² One such friend opined that she had always liked Toshiba TV and hi-fi equipment and preferred to buy Toshiba for that reason. Also, because it was Japanese and she always bought Japanese cars because they were "better". I can actually take issue with her first argument, because most of the Toshiba stuff I have bought over the years has been just as crappy as my original laptop. And the second argument is laughable because first, the Toshiba was probably made in Singapore or Malaysia, and the HP we were also looking at at the same time (it was at Beast [sic] Buy) undoubtedly had plenty of Asian components inside. I would also argue that my '91 Ford Escort was a better car than the Nissan whateverthehellitwas (same class of car, I'm just blanking on the model) she was driving back when I was in the Escort. But..."Shiny!"
³ The Vostros are too expensive because they come with Windows 7 Professional. She can buy Windows 7 Professional from the IU bookstore for $20 if she wants the upgrade. I don't think she will need it.
⁴ Please, no responses that we should go to Beast [sic] Buy or Fry's or MicroCenter or some other damn place and buy Toshiba/Sony/HP/WTF. This is a Dell household. I may be pissed at them now but I'll get over it. I just felt like ranting because I think the situation is ridiculous. Oh, and yes, we know we can buy a laptop for her through IU's academic purchase program...but the Inspiron 14r they offer has a slower CPU and costs only about $40 less. Not worth bothering with unless there are some other options I haven't seen yet.