SemiAntics

Dell used to be a decent company. What happened? Grace got a Dell Photo 924 printer as a present a few years ago. It’s a rebranded Lexmark X615 (I have heard, but obviously nobody is confirming this!) It doesn’t have drivers for GNU/Linux (or Mac). It’s described as an expensive paperweight by some people, and accurately too. To get to the point, the power adapter went bad on it, so I thought I would get a new one and sell it so that we could have one that works on GNU/Linux. To my surprise, the new adapter from Dell is $50. They even recommended that I buy a new printer rather than get a new adapter! What a horrible waste! I asked them what I was supposed to do with the old printer. They said I could recycle it (send it back to Dell for free and they would re-manufacture it and sell it again). So Dell gets paid twice for the same printer. Nice.

It turns out that Lexmark sells the adapter for $20 and you can even find it online for about $8 used (plus shipping). That’s more along the lines of what I expected. I will never buy another Dell product (my first laptop was a Dell, and that is back when they had good customer support). I recommend that everyone avoid buying Dell products. It’s just not worth it.

Would you rather have your kids see a movie with (possibly explicit) scenes of people killing each other, or with (again, possibly explicit) scenes of people making love to each other? Think about it. I’m not the first to ask this question, and I hope I’m not the last.