Dell - grrr

Technology
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So, I’ve been musing, prevaricating and generally umming and ahhing regards a new laptop.

To be honest I don’t need  a new laptop - indeed I probably don’t need a laptop at all - but the one I have is well over 10 years old (closer to 15 I suspect) and, while it works, it is pretty useless and has only got a 720p display, but if I’m honest I rarely need to try to get it out and use it. Even the newer one we have in France is 7 years old now.

So, having looked at specs, got annoyed that I can’t have all the features I want in one product and come to the conclusion that anything I’d buy is too expensive - but the Dell XPS 15 did look to tick all the boxes (except it’s £££ and a bit).

So, when they knocked £500 off for Black Friday I was sufficiently tempted to click “buy”.

Before I did so the website encouraged “buy before 5pm for next day delivery”, once on the product page it said " :ballot_box_with_check: Ready to ship".

Flushed with excitement that my desire for retail therapy would be sated with instant gratification I rushed to enter my credit card number and click “continue”.

BUT, once past the rubicon the confirmation read “Delivery by Thursday Feb 9 2023”

WTF Dell!!!

I really hope that’s a glitch :rage:

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I’d like to think that’s an error, but it is Dell we’re discussing. Probably best to ping their customer service and get clarification of when it will ship.

Black Friday deals should be delivered ASAP, not 2 months later.

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I’ll give it a day and see what happens.

You’d think they’d be built, configured, and ready to go out of the door as they clearly do a fixed run and expect to sell out.

Perhaps not.

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Those XPSs are really nice looking and specced. I had one a few years ago - when they were still made of plastic - great machine.

Hope you get yours soon.

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I just switched the display on my laptop to a 1920x1080 for about £50 which will now give me another couple of years.

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Curious, I would not have thought an upgrade possible for most laptops - how did you manage that?

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Speaking of laptops, I hope @John_Scully can help me!?

I remember a post from ages ago where I think you talked about changing the (possibly?) graphics card on your Mac to give it a new lease of life.

How easy is it to do this?

My Mac is from 2012 and slowing down. I don’t want to have to switch over to a subscription model for the programmes I have on the laptop.

Any advice appreciated! :pray:

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What model?

Changing graphics cards isn’t possible on most laptops, and would probably not give a general boost anyway.

Switching from a hard drive to an SSD can help keep older machines going a bit longer.

@John_Scully - do you recall the upgrade details?

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IIRC the 2012 MacBook was the last one with any upgradeable capabilities, but don’t think that extended to the graphics card - pretty sure that’s soldered to the board.

FWIW I still use my Dell XPS daily. Bought it in 2014 as an upgrade for the late 2008 MacBook that was already painfully slow, and really glad I did.

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You could change graphics cards on the old Cheesegrater Macs, but even then, you needed a special Mac friendly version of the card.

About the only upgrades you can perform on MacBooks is adding more RAM or replacing the HDD with an SSD.

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Depends if it was even dedicated graphics, eg the 2012 pro 13 was an intel CPU and used integrated graphics.

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Thanks @billybutcher @NotALot and @Ancient_Mariner for your responses

It is a MacBook Pro 15 inch from mid 2012. Processor 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7, and 4GB Memory which I don’t think is a lot? Am not an expert!

For the Graphics it says NVIDIA Geforce GT 650M 512 MB and Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB

Can I get an SSD from Amazon? Or do you recommend I try and get it from Apple?

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I’d buy the SSD from who ever will give you a decent price and warranty. Also worth taking the ram to at least 8gb now, though if you only use the machine for surfing etc that’s probably enough, especially if you still use software that’s current with your machine.

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Thanks again!

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You should be able to upgrade RAM and hard drive to SSD. the maximum RAM officially supported was 8G, but 16G is reported to work (2x 8GB DIMMs).

The “Intel HD graphics” is the one integrated to the CPU, the Geforce GT 650M is the “dedicated” graphics, I’d be very surprised if it was not soldered to the board so won’t be upgradable.

I’d expect the CPU to be soldered as well on anything that wasn’t truly ancient, but you’ve got the best CPU supported by the platform by the sound of it.

In fact it is illustrative of just how ancient my existing laptop is, that it actually had a socketed CPU.

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I have replaced a couple of laptop screens - very easy to do, the plastic surround comes off, then 4 small screws and a ribbon connector.

I bought it from here:

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@billybutcher Thank you! With the help of YouTube videos do you think this is something I can do myself?

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I don’t see why not.

I guess if better resolution was originally an option it could be done easily enough.

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It was an iMac, you know the all in one desktop things. My problem was that I couldn’t upgrade to the latest MacOS because it required Metal graphics and I wouldn’t be able to sleep with out the latest OS :roll_eyes:.

It was possible to change the “card” but it was very much a DIY effort and looked like a nightmare, pulling the screen/chassis apart, little vulnerable cables going everywhere, etc. etc. Also one of the fans had started to play up and despite putting some pretty sophisticated software on it I could diagnose that problem.

So I wrote my self a business case for a new one to try and assuage my guilt, decided I’d be a long time dead so why not squander a few bob and buy a new one. It’s 21" rather then the old one’s 27"s which is better IMO. Big enough to. be able to have loads of windows open but not so big as to dominate the desk.

Overall it’s generally brilliant, Apple M1 chip and an excellent screen.

Yes I agree. Whene working I was very keen on developing annuity revenue streams, it meant you started the new financial yer with at least a % of your revenue in the bag. It took most of the software industry twenty years to work that out. Now even things that obviously should be one time charge (OTC) are tryng to squeeze an subscription fee out of you. Sometimes only a subscription version is offered on the AppStore but on the vendors own website you can buy OTC, maybe with out free “upgrades” (but with fixes) but if the application is to perform a specific task, who cares?

I do have two subscriptions. The first is Microsoft Office, My wife, daughter and I get the whole office suite plus 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage each all for €99 PA which IMO is extraordinary good value (something I never associated with MS before). The subscription os for up to five people so I’ve another 2TB of cloud storage I case I go mad.

I also have a subscription to Apple One which gives the three of us (once again five max) Apple music, Appel TV+, shared iCloud storage (2TB), Apple Arcade (games), News+ and Fitness+ (whatever that is🤭). That’s quite expensive at €28.95 a month (and going up to an unjustified €31.95 in December) but my wife and daughter like the music, I like the cloud storage and it’s our own fault we don’t use the other services enough.

Everything else is OTC. Remember to keep the installation packages, that way you may be able to reinstall even if the vendor has moved to a subscription model.

Anyway, enough wittering on. Earlier this year I was very impressed with an Amazon Echo my daughter has, Alexa voice recognition seems is far better than Siri, so I took advantage of Black Friday on Amazon to buy a few devises at 30-40% off. I have to go and get then to work.

Me too.

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Thanks @John_Scully

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