I had a similar experience with Dell after they wanted the price of a new laptop for a replacement laptop battery. This was for the Dell Studio back when battery packs were made to be swappable by simply sliding a latch.

After that phone call to customer support, I made a similar vow to never buy another Dell product. These days, I use a Framework laptop.

You couldn't buy something from eBay or TaoBao/Alibaba?

I did in fact buy a knock-off from ebay battery, but it kept it kept it's charge for hilariously little time. Had to run it of mains power permanently (ran it as a little server for a while).

Don't know your exact timing but I run basically on Dells Latitude laptops for past 2 decades. Since its just for travel and not my primary workhorse, I buy used corporate ones for pittance (cca 300$ for models worth 1500 few years before), and swap battery myself for another original OEM one, they cost less than 100$ from original manufacturer. Its just 2-3 philips screws and 1 cable, anybody can do it. They last just as much as advertised on new ones and don't degrade much even after few years.

Batteries (and ie chargers) are one of the things that's utterly idiotic to shop around on chinese portals. You literally always get what you pay for (or worse) and can't punch above this threshold.

This was mid 2010s and the laptop has long since bit the dust. IIRC this was a Dell Studio 15, but I recall checking eBay for old new stock with no luck, but it doesn't surprise me that the Dell Latitudes have lots of stock floating around ebay.

If Sir is buying his lithium batteries and/or power transformers from the likes of eBay, Alibaba and Amazon, then Sir may wish to check his fire insurance is up to date.

I have bought many third party rechargable batteries from those sites over the years. Yes, slightly lower charge capacity compared to original, but no fires. And, yes, I know my sample size is small!

One ebay sourced Chinese transformer that blew its back off (!) letting our the magic smoke and tripping the RCB was enough for me.

These days I'm older and wiser.

I also had similar good experiences buying batteries on Aliexpress. The issue with those typically isn't intrinsic quality as the batteries are most of the time good but lack of quality control. Bad batteries will reach the market and this is specially dangerous with packs with many cells like e-bikes packs.

FWIW, it was the same (even at the enterprise level).

We had a commodity (local cloud) computing Dell infra in the mid 2010s and were constantly replacing/returning “simple stuff” (fans, support flanges, memory, NICs).

“Dude, you’re gettn’ a Dell” became—-nope, never again.

My sitch was around the same time period.

I feel like there are not good quality hardware company nowadays.

Dell: the land of motherboard dying and dog shit trackpads.

Asus: dead soldered RAM.

Most BIOS: too long to boot, it's fucking 2024 what is your BIOS doing it needs more than 2s to boot? It was taking the same time to boot 30 years ago.

Every mouse: double click problem due to wrong use of the actuators.

And every hardware company has to try to cram some badly designed software and require you to create an account.

Your trackpad comment brought back a memory of 6 of us in a conference room.

We all had the same OS (NT) to the same patch level, same trackpad config, and same model of Dell laptop and every _single_ trackpad felt different. They weren't strictly "defective", but just wildly disparate physical feels and responsiveness.

I will give shout-outs to: 4th gen Kindles (has physical buttons and lasts forever), first gen iPhone SE, and Microsoft Mobile Mouse 3600.

> too long to boot, it's fucking 2024 what is your BIOS doing it needs more than 2s to boot?

Me crying in first-gen Ryzen/x370 with my upward of 20 seconds POST time.

You'll love ddr5 times.

Sarcastically, or seriously? Is the issue due to memory? Training or something?

Training, till you get used to it you'll think something went wrong during boot.

Why does it take that long to post? I've had multiple Ryzen 300-series motherboards, none of them take anywhere near that long to boot outside of using something like some server-grade HBA that has its own boot step.

I have no idea, but it's a known issue, memory training maybe? It's a gaming PC so nothing special going on, ROG HERO motherboard, 32GB DDR4 (4x8GB), GTX 1080Ti.

I haven't used it much in recent years, I built it for gaming but had kids a couple of years later, now I game on whatever is convenient in the small burts I get; which is also the reason I haven't bothered upgrading it.

Why does boot time matter? Is something wrong with the sleep mode in your laptop?

> tho@phobos:/usr/local/src/sbcl$ uptime 11:31:50 up 250 days, 21:10, 1 user, load average: 0.60, 0.37, 0.40

I stupidly updated my firmware on my ThinkPad 14 running Linux and that removed the perfectly working S3 sleep and gave me a non-working ridiculous S0x instead.

> your laptop

I kinda like my desktops.

Is there something wrong with the sleep mode on your desktop?

I miss the laptops from Toshiba. Decent price and very reliable, easy to upgrade.

I would tepidly recommend lenovo, they support the firmware for a long time and most things work. Warranty is what you decide to buy. Designs tend to be pretty serviceable but it varies in the models and over the years.

You may want to look at the Samsung 5K monitor. It can often be had for $700. The sharpness of text is beautiful, especially if you're using a mac since it's optimized at 218ppi to avoid scaling. But, it might be smaller than you want. Apple also makes one that is nearly identical, except for the price.

PS - I have seen Dell go downhill as well. I returned the last Dell laptop I bought. My wife was sitting next to me on the couch and her macbook had full wifi bars while the dell had one bar. I did some research and they were using a pretty cheap wifi controller and maybe also had poor antenna design. I ordered a ThinkPad for the same price and it was great.

Have had a similar experience with Dell. Have exclusively used new and second-hand Dell Laptops (Inspiron & Latitude) for the past fifteen years with no problems. Purchased a XPS 15 directly from Dell five months ago and the battery charging circuitry has fried itself. Support ticket has been open for 40+ days awating parts...

> You may want to look at the Samsung 5K monitor.

Which Samsung are you talking about? We got some new screens at work, Samsung S9 something or other. 27", 5K, thunderbolt 4. As you say, the text is very sharp, and colors seem fine enough. But that's about it, and I would not recommend them at all.

The worst issue is that the viewing angles are ridiculously bad. I'm sitting at arm's length, and the borders are very dark and somewhat blurry. They're of course OK if I move and look at them straight on, but my 32", fairly old LG doesn't have this problem.

Another pain point is the fact that it cuts off the power supply and the USB peripherals plugged in when it goes to sleep. I couldn't figure any way of disabling this behavior. But if you leave your PC running and expecting to connect to it over a USB network adaptor or similar, you're gonna have a bad time.

Yes, that's the one (Samsung only has one 5K monitor). Most reviews I've seen have been pretty positive about it, but it's good to hear a dissenting opinion as well.

I believe the viewing angle problem you're talking about is due to the anti-glare finish. It's a trade off for sure (one that some people would not want). I assume that's why Apple offers their consumer 5K monitor with or without that finish.

Apple also has a Pro 5K monitor. LG also has one older 5K, and those are the only 5K monitors currently on the market.

It's true that the anti-glare works OK. By that, I mean that I've never thought about it, and now that you mention it, I realize it's a good thing since I never felt the need to complain (I don't usually hold back). The screen is also very sharp and doesn't exhibit the weird texture some anti-glare coatings used to have.

However, in that particular office, there are no strong sources of light that would shine directly on the screens, so it's hard to say how good it actually is, especially when comparing to other models. The screen can also get pretty bright, so it should be able to handle most lighting situations in an office.

I type this on a Dell U3223QE, on a black background, with two lamps right behind me. The lamps aren't very bright, but the room is fairly dark (it's still night here). I can see the glare if I pay attention to it (didn't notice it before reading your comment). This is a 32" screen, sitting at roughly the same distance as the Samsung, yet it doesn't exhibit the viewing angle issue at all.

I do know that having a brightish window behind me with this screen requires upping the brightness, or the glare would be a pain. Never tried the Samsung in that configuration.

That's surprising given that Dell usually offers very good warranty on their monitors, at least to consumers. Was this a bussiness (B2B) purchase perhaps?

not my experience, but maybe for some. The big problem is the quality has gone way down hill in the past 10+ years, and the warranty periods are ridiculously small. TVs and monitors are all built (and warrantied) now like they should be replaced every 3-5 years.

You used to have a 32" 8K monitor and when it died you went for a 43" 4K monitor instead? Isn't that a massive difference in pixel density?

Can't answer for them, but: lots of us are older and need glasses. To really benefit from your preferred resolution would mean tiny fonts that give me eyestrain. It makes sense for a phone or tablet held close up; for a monitor a meter away it mainly just increases the expense at every level (including video ram and bandwidth). OTOH more area is worth spending more on.

I use a mac, so it would run it scaled. Apple likes to call it Retina. Makes text look as clear as if it were printed on paper.

While I would prefer to have a large and HiDPI display in the future, unscaled 4k was more economical and has fringe benefits of not needing special setup/handling. I lost $5-6k with my failed Dell and am hesitant to spend a lot again since it was supposed to be a decade purchase.

Thinking back the only other monitor I've ever lost was a Dell as well.. including 30 years of CRTs and CCFL LCDs never had any issues with other brands :(

I never owned a Dell screen, but I once had a Dell laptop and it was built like a tank. My brother had a 27" LG monitor from back when 27" was the biggest and best you could get, wasn't even 4k back then. It just died one day, probably the back light. I had a 24" CCFL monitor that actually never died, just got dimmer and dimmer every year, after about 5 years it was about half as bright as it was new.

Today I mostly use my 16" Macbook, which is quite close to being 4K. I really enjoy the HiDPI and the 120Hz refresh rate, makes it hard to use an external monitor since you can rarely get a HiDPI and high refresh montiro.