Thanks Wetzel, I work at a store exactly like that- locally owned and operated, I know every regular customer's name, we give special prices to regular customers, if you're 5$ short there's no problem, etc. Anytime anyone has a problem I'll do my best to help them out (resulting in happy customer and happy computer). Try getting that out of Dell, Compaq/HP, or Sony. I reiterate from my previous posts that 95% of the computers we service here are major brands, and a large chunk of them are still "in warranty" with the manufacturer, yet the people don't mind paying extra to see to it the job gets done right.

Dell killed my master and left me for dead. Now I begin my quest for vengeance.

I also have a Dell horror story...

About 5 years ago, my family bought a Dell computer. It looked nice and worked great, that is until my brother put a floppy disk with a bent metal piece into the floppy drive, and the metal piece got stuck in there. We called up Dell for service, and about a week later, a service guy came to our house, but stated that for some reason in order to fix the floppy drive he had to erase the entire hard drive:( .

That was just the beginning of our problems. Several weeks later, the computer broke down again. After several frustrating late nights on the phone with the "Award Winning" Dell Tech-Support team, they finally agreed to send us a new computer, which also broke down in a matter of weeks. After that, we decided to just send it back, get a refund, and buy a Micron instead, which lasted us from that day until this past September.

...and that's the story of why I hate Dell.

Dude, I got my dell :) well me and the rest of my friends before we all went off to college. No problems here.

/me hugs computer...I love my laptop

It is strange to me listening to these horror stories about Dell. I got a Dell Dimension 4100 Desktop PC during Febuary of 2001, about two years ago. I took that thing apart and put it back together. I installed, used, uninstalled, and caused dozens of error messages to pop-up on my screen a day. It has held up better than any other computer I have ever had or used. I downloaded and installed over 200 programs. I still have 30 geg's left. It runs extremely fast. I have never had to wait for it to do anything. I have never used disc defrag or any other method of speeding up the computer. My brother got the same exact computer at the same time. He hasn't had any problems with it either.

Now, I will admit that I have had my share of problems. They were all caused by installing, uninstalling, and deleting things. Here is a problem I have now.

My computer crashed recently. I have it up and running right now. The "Windows ME...Millennium Edition" screen (a white screen) used to show during startup. Now, it doesn't show up. I just see a DOS-looking screen that says "Starting Windows". I don't know how to change that back to the way it was. I found a bitmap in the Windows folder that looked like the picture but I don't know how to get it to appear while the computer is starting up.

Someone please help me.