I hate doing work more than once or making something more complicated than it needs to be in Indianpolis Information Technology. Take for instance, Casseroles! Casseroles are fast easy and everything is in one dish. One dish to take to a party, one dish to clean. No worries about the proper proportions of Veggies, and meat. Those choices were done ahead of time.

This is why I like Dell. Sorry, HP/Compaq and Toshiba. Although the Hardware in all three manufacturers’ Indianapolis Small Business Computer machines is pretty similar when it comes to their business class, Dell comes out ahead in the Indianapolis IT Outsourcing world for three main and very influential reasons.

Proprietary Software Galore! So let me ask you this. When did the world decide it wanted The manufacturer to create and install loads of poorly written software on business class machines? When receive a new machine for a client and it has more than 20 proprietary nonsense software installed which has nothing to do with the machine performing properly, it makes me ask why? Why make this machine more complicated and include more points of failure. I can understand 1-5 things the manufacturer may want to included to say, “Hey, we thought about you” but please do not drown us. It wastes our time by having to go through deleting all of this junk so it will not interfere later on. So Dell, you get an A+ for having far fewer junk applications installed on your new business class machines.

Speaking of making things harder and more complicated than it needs to be, HP and Toshiba have restore CD/DVD’s which ship with their new equipment. Great idea right? Kinda. If you are a regular home user or an in house technician with a small or medium size business then this should not bother you much. However, for Larger IT departments and  Computer Network Consulting Groups, and Computer Outsooucing scompanies managing more than 20 machines it begins to become quite difficult keeping track of so many CD’s and ensuring you have the proper discs if a machine needs to be restored. Especially if you have an HP machine, as HP requires 2 discs, one for system prep which Must be used prior to using the Recovery Disc. By the way, they are not labeled so be sure not to accidentally mix them up with another set.  Also, HP and Toshiba Recovery Discs are Model Specific. This means, as an outsourced company trying to follow the Boy Scout modo “Be Prepared” you would be insane to try and carry around recovery discs to clients, if by chance you needed one or the client miss placed their copy (which happens a lot).  Dell Shines here because each OS disc shipped from Dell can be used on any other Dell Machine. One Disc, Many Computers. Can you Say Freedom or Simple. Of course this opens the door for licensing problems, so be careful not to install Vista on a machine the only came with XP.

So far Dell has been Rock’n out with simple machines and simple recovery options for computer services. Dell continues this trend online support. If by chance you miss place your driver disc, all three manufacturers have support online to download the original or updated drivers. All you have to do is look at the three websites support pages and you will know who will come on top, as if this blog has not given it away already. Once again Dells simple design enables you to easily find and download the 5 or so drivers you need to run your system. HP and Toshiba are left to feel silly as they must offer the myriad of proprietary software which originally shipped with the PC, leave the technician to filter through to find the required chipsets nic drivers.

So Dell My Hat is off to you. Thank you for making my life simply easy. Everything from the initial install onsite to the rebuild/repair of a machine is simpler with your products. Keep it up and you will keep my business. I hope this has encouraged other IT support Companies as well. So Keep your Network Support Clean and Simple with Dell.