The Linux Extremist

I am a compulsive tinkerer. It’s rare when a boxed system is good enough for me; I am always looking to make changes in my systems in order to optimise performance. Had I lived 50 years ago, I suppose I would have been out in the garage fiddling around with cars, trying to build a hot rod and terrorising the back roads of West Sussex. It’s probably safer for all concerned that I am more interested in building a computer powerful enough to communicate with space aliens.

Linux and tinkering go hand in hand. Linux forces the user to be conscious of what’s in their computer, and enables the user to fine tune it. This is in stark contrast to how Windows promises to take care of everything for you, and then does so badly. Then, they promise if you spend a lot of money on an upgrade, that it will take care of the problems that it had, but then again, it will create more problems in doing so.

To a lesser extent this scenario is also true of Dell. Recent encounters with this manufacturer’s work have made me want to scream “Waste! Waste! Waste!” in the same tone of voice that aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers used when they found fresh humans.

I am presently using a Dell Dimenson XPS T600 running Xubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06. It’s acceptable; with a wireless card and an Nvidia AGPx2 card, it is part of the modern world, if only just. The tinkerer in me wants to get into the guts of the machine, replace the motherboard and processor, so that it can get more mileage on the clock. I want to extend what I have, increase the speed of the machine, and thus make it so that Openoffice isn’t maxxing out the CPU when I fire it up.

I can’t do that, however. Dell’s cases, motherboards and power supplies are proprietary. In order to rebuild this computer, I have to literally start from scratch, with a new case and power supply, in short, I can’t “rebuild it” - I can only scavenge the non-proprietary parts and build a new one. From a waste perspective, this is a disaster - the motherboard, this plastic and metal case can’t be “recycled” except in the most basic, junk crunching sense.

Other Dells have given me similar problems. My girlfriend’s Latitude LS is approximately the same age as this desktop. However, the power supply and battery also appear to be proprietary. In order to fix it up, I have to pay over the odds for a new battery and power supply; it’s expensive to the point where it makes more sense to purchase a brand new laptop.

I’ve gone trawling for other horror stories of this type and there are many; a good example is this one from 2004 -

We were going to transfer an internal DAT tape drive from an older Dell server to a new Dell PowerEdge 2600. While scoping the new hardware for fit/rails/etc., I noticed that there were no power cables available in the 5 1/4″ drive bays. So I called Dell Tech Support and was told that the only way to add additional drives would be to purchase Dell supplied peripherals which would come with an appropriate backplane that would plug into a proprietary connector to provide power and data transfer connections.

So we got the kit from Dell. It contained a standard DAT drive, plus a standard SCSI cable. The gotcha was a semi-standard power cable that plugged into a power port on the systemboard. I probably could have found this power cable by going to a specialty cable shop or a clone computer shop, but my time is worth more than that. What Dell cheaped out on was in not providing the power cable with the server. They also didn’t provide a part number for the power cable, which would have solved my problem. Their tech support was so bad that they caused me to spend $700 that was unnecessary.

To be fair to Dell, this behaviour is not only common, some regard it as a good business practice. I once read an article in the Economist which complained that German manufacturers were building products to last, rather than building in a replacement cycle, so as to encourage more business. To me that’s absolutely crazy. It’s much less wasteful to build things that endure, or at the very least, to be able to upgrade them when requirements become more intense. I have experienced this with my custom made desktop; I purchased it approximately at the same time the Dell Dimenson XPS T600 was still a new model. The only things that are from the first build in it now are the floppy drive and the case. The discarded parts found a use in other machines, including this one (fortunately Dell doesn’t have proprietary PCI and AGP slots). I am conserving what I have, making do and mending, and yet I am not “suffering” for it.

Fortunately, my company has moved on from Dell as a preferred supplier to a non-proprietary solution. When upgrade time comes for Vista (as it inevitably will for many people in my company), the costs will be kept down. That said, people should be conscious of what they’re getting when they buy a Dell. It may seem like they’re getting a good solution at the time; however in the medium to long term, the cheerfulness of some like the Dell Dude aside, they’re getting some Hell.

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