OEM's what have you done to your Websites????

I've been making budgets for work for years. I am seasoned dealing with OEM websites like Dell, HP and Lenovo. I don't know who they have been hiring to maintain their websites but it's turned to shit.

I couldn't find the HP Z240 model I had put on my sheet unless I look for it on google. Instead of putting their machines in series like they used to, you get about 100 systems listed when you look for a desktop.

And what moron at Dell thought that putting the 3420 and 3620 together in the 3000 series was a good idea. I don't want to find out after completely configuring a system that it is the WRONG fucking system. And the Dell 3420 does not come in Tower form but their websites leads you to think it does. Imagine a purchaser in a regular company that has to buy systems...


I thought it was just me, but everyone else I've talked to, also says it's almost impossible to find anything.  How come the sites were so good in the past and such crap now?

Sad news

On Thursday I found out that the guy who built the supports for my original displaywall and my 2nd displaywall, had passed away. He was one of the maintenance workers, who made all sorts of shelves, trolleys, wooden spacers and built many of our displaywalls. He was known as a grumpy Frenchman, because he mostly had a scowl on his face, but he was a sweet man with a twinkle in his eye and a wonky sense of humour.  I'm not sure how many years he worked with us, but I was always happy with his work.  He left us 5 months ago because he had ALS and he was no longer able to do much.  He's been exposed at a funeral home this week-end in Mascouche. He will be missed, but not forgotten. Little parts of him are all over my department.

Top 4 monitors have mounts that go on an angle, since the top 4 were hard to see from my chair

Above is my first displaywall, after it was re-adjusted to handle all Dell panels. Originally I had 8 Philips and 8 Acers. The Philips were larger because they had built in speakers so my wall was slightly lopsided. It was well built, because it was easy for the current maintenance guy to adjust it so I could put all Dell panels. The technology still needs some tweaking. It was hellish getting this working originally. I went through so many cables.

Original wall layout with mismatched monitors, and before I got different mounts for the top 4

 In case you're a curious geek, I'm driving 12 displays using 2  Graphics cards, and using only 2 display cables per card, though each card has 6 inputs.   I'm running these Dell U2413's in MST [Daisy chain]. The system is a Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4, with 16 Gb of ram. 

4 sets of 3 Dell U2413 in MST [Daisy chain] driven by 2 graphics cards

It takes getting used to, having monitors that have inputs and outputs.  I've labelled all the DP outs with a big OUT, to avoid some confusion. Or to avoid my team returning LCDs to me telling me they don't work in displayport, and the only reason they aren't working is that they are trying to get an "in" signal out of an "out" port. It's happened a few times. I've also spent an hour debugging why my LCD wasn't working and I was using the wrong port on the first one but not on the 2nd one. Yep. True story.

New updated display wall

Was playing video on my newly updated wall of lcds. The 12 bottom ones are Dell U2413.

This was media player stretched over  12 displays in 4x3 and running a 4k video. WOOT!

What is the matter with PC vendor's websites of late?

I really heavily on the websites of companies like Dell, HP, Lenovo, and IBM to get drivers for the machines I use for testing. Lately I've been needing display drivers for the onboard graphic devices of machines from the vendors listed above.

This is the 3rd or 4th time I run into a website that is not functional!  Does not make me impressed. This morning it is HP. I've tried 3 times to get access to drivers for an older machine and I get "SERVICE UNAVILABLE".

Two weeks ago it was Dell, I wanted to download the new system BIOS for the Dell T7600, one of their latest machines. I got a website error and try again later. Still same issue the next day.

Last week it was Lenovo. Was trying to get drivers for one of their newer systems as well. I kept getting to a page not found.

Not impressed. 

Update on "Ah the help you get"

About a month ago I had an entry about the incompetence of the live chat tech on the Dell site. I had told one of my co-workers that the machine he wanted came with the features he wanted. 

Well the machine arrived last week, it was UEFI, had Wind8ws 64 bits installed and secure boot enabled. That means that if you do not use a card with UEFI graphics BIOS it will NOT BOOT. Of course to make it boot you can change settings in the systems UEFI BIOS and disable secure boot.

In the end I was right and the dell live chat tech didn't know her ass from her elbow. The machine came with the exact features my co-worker wanted.

Ah the help you get.....

Today one of my colleagues came to ask me for my opinion on what system we should order that will ship to us with Wind8ws. This will help us testing some of the features of Wind8ws in a machine that fully supports it.  Originally he wanted to buy a machine in the Inspiron line but I suggested we go instead with a PC in the Optiplex line, like the 3100. That it would be in similar price range but more the type of PC our customers use.

He was unsure the PC had the features he wanted and chatted live with someone from Dell. She assured him this machine was not UEFI. So he came to see me rather defeated. Personally I thought the chat person just didn't know much about the machine she's selling. The previous generation Optiplex we have in the lab is actually UEFI. I doubt they would go backwards.

Windows 8 - and PC desktops

Apparently I'm not the only one who sees that Wind8ws might be a nightmare for those who are going to use a desktop computer as opposed to a tablet or a smartphone. 

I've been using versions of Windows since 1992.  I hate the double desktop, makes it non-intuitive for someone who just needs to get email and work on documents. This article is from experts and what they have to say about Wind8ws

I had said that I doubted OEMs would be very keen. It seems HP and Lenovo are going full speed but Dell is not so much. Dell seems to want to stick to windows 7 as its shipping OS on most machines for a little while longer.

UEFI Growing pains

I like the theory of UEFI and it's about time that GPT standard gets more widespread. It was available with windows Vista and server 2008 but the way it was done in those OS does not seem compatible with Windows 8.  I tried setting up a drive several times with Vista 64, server 2008 64, Windows 7 64, Server 2008 R2, Windows 8 64 and Server 2012. In theory it should have worked. In practice it did not.  I could get vista and Windows 7 to play nice together, I can can windows 7 and windows 8 playing nice together. But all 3 was a no go.

Switching booting between legacy and UEFI mode is painful. I'm not sure if it's worse on a Dell because I don't care for Dells, and I've been arguing with dells for several days now. I had setup one Dell T1650 with one drive in UEFI mode for Windows 7 64, Server 2008 R2, Windows 8 64 and server 2012, the other drive had all legacy OS, all 32 bit OS and of course that vista 64 and server 2008 64 that were not compatible in UEFI mode. This second drive was in legacy mode and of course MBR. I use XP to partition the drive.   I had switched back and forth between both drives without any issues, and the system went - when it came back it was no longer booting on the UEFI drive. Kept saying no boot device found.

Then there's the Dell T1600 where I had a drive with all OS between XP and server 2008 R2, in leagcy mode, and I setup Windows 8 and server 2012 in UEFI mode. It was working fabulously until I lent it to a less tech savvy colleague. Now it will boot into it's drive if I'm using the onboard graphics card, but won't boot using an add-in card to a hard disk. It will hang. Since I need to test it with add-in cards it won't be particularly useful to the intern who's supposed to have it as a test machine.

It;s weird too when you switch between UEFI and legacy mode on the T1600, it tends to lose all boot devices and goes to this weird  default legacy mode, and if you want to set it in UEFI you cannot go between you have no options. It's just really weird. It's like no one thought it through.

HP seems to handle the switching between both better.  My Lenovo can be incredibly bitchy as devices appear and disappears as well in 'UEFI" mode. 

Another interesting discovery one of my interns made with build 8441 of Windows 8 is that if you were configured in UEFI mode and ran Worldbench 6, it would trash your hard disk.  I've since confirmed it with Windows 8 RTM. It trashed my hard disk.  I wonder what other software will also trash my hard disk in such a way that I can't reghosted it using the 'partition' method. So far that method has worked really well for me.  You can run worldbench 6 in non UEFI mode and it won't trash your drive but it may not run particularly well.

Something tells me that my near future will be filled with me restoring drives that get trashed in GPT mode. So far it's happened several times on a fairly small sampling.