You know my spanking new computer? The one I was giddy about, the one I was in love with?
It sucks.
Raise your right hand and repeat after me. "I will never, ever, as long as live, until the cows come home and leave again, buy a computer from Dell!"
Very good.
Here’s the gist…..this computer came loaded with Windows Media Center Edition XP (MCE). MCE is an operating system that supports DVR technology, among another things. MCE is NOT meant to be run on dinky, cheap home computers. It just won’t let your applications work right.But we didn’t know that then….
So, I load all my applications. I try to use basic functionality in PSE 3.0…and CRASH, the program shuts down. I have this shiny, fast new computer that won’t run Photoshop Elements! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! My old, dinky computer will run this software. Why won’t the new one run it?
Dell Support is a joke…no help at all. You can only understand them 50% of the time, anyway (Dell currently outsources to India). Half the time I felt like I was schooling the Dell person instead of them schooling me.
We updated device drivers. We uninstalled & reinstalled the software. We upgraded the PSE software. We eliminated devices one by one. We restored factory settings. We formatted the hard drive, repartitioned, and started over.
Nothing worked. Nothing. We finally narrowed the problem down (after extensive research) to the operating system. Did you know that there are dozens & dozens of posts on Google Groups and other IT sites about the incompatibility of MCE with Dell home computers? So, it’s clear, we need a different operating system.
We tried to load XP Professional. Dell is so darn proprietary & exclusive that they make it almost impossible to load a new operating system that does not come from them. XP could not detect Dell’s hard drive. We could have gotten it to work with downloaded SATA drivers if we had a floppy drive…but guess what…Dell doesn’t put floppy drives in computers any more (unless you ask).
Soo…..we call Dell (again). They agree to send us XP Home without any argument. In fact, they are familiar with the problem (why they didn’t mention this the first 2 times we called, I don’t know). Hmm….something is definitely rotten in the State of Denmark (obscure Hamlet reference…did you get it??). Anyhoo….obviously Dell is having big problems with MCE loaded onto its crappy home computers.
Moral of the story. Do NOT use MCE unless you have the proper system. Do NOT buy a computer from Dell. They sell products designed to fail.