[OPLINTECH] Lenovo Vs. Dell

[Chad Neeper]

It has been my experience that you should probably approach the question in
two parts. First, judge the manufacturer as a company...What is the
company's general reputation, continuing viability as a business in the
computer manufacturing segment, quality of support, etc.? Second judge the
model of the computer you're looking to purchase.

I'd suggest this twofold eval based on my own observations that, while a
company may generally be a good company to work with, some of the company's
offerings hold up better than others. I sometimes use Dell as an example.
Generally, I like Dell products and they seem to stand behind their
hardware pretty consistently as far as I can tell. However, one of my
clients that had purchased ~100 desktops directly from Dell (Optiplex 320,
I think the model was) had a hard drive failure rate that was rather
unacceptable IMO. While the computer was a good computer, the hard drives
Dell chose to put in that model were too much on the cheap side and as a
consequence, I ended up having to replace them more often than I cared to.
(Good for me, from a profitability standpoint of getting paid for the
service time...but that money should have been spent on improvements and
not repairs!) During that same timeframe, other computer models from Dell I
noticed had better hard drives...and much lower failure rates.

What I take away from that is basically...judge the company, but also
independently judge the model of the device you're looking to purchase.
Companies often have "good" (often more expensive "business/enterprise
line") products and "bad" (often cheap or "value line") products. Sometimes
it's worth it to pay a little extra for the "good" models.


Specifically to your question, Lenovo purchased IBM laptop division
(ThinkPad) around 2005. The quality of that series of models still seems to
be pretty high and it looks like it's still considered to be Lenovo's
higher-quality business/enterprise line of laptop products. When it comes
to the lower-end laptop models, I haven't touched them...can't say. Same
for their desktop lines of products...haven't had the opportunity to work
on them.


When it comes to the desktops, there are some gotchas to watch for, though:
 You can make any computer from Company A cheaper than another computer
from Company B. The devil is in the details. Pay close attention to them
when you're comparing the two computer models. Watch for the CPU, the RAM,
and the hard drive. Those are the most important parts to compare that
affect performance the most, IMO. All three of those components can
together hugely affect the rage of performance and price. If Lenovo's price
is cheaper than Dell's, compare those three parts and see if the
performance of Lenovo's offering is lower too. You may not have an
apples-to-apples comparison.


Lastly, I've been custom building desktops for my own clients since around
2005. I've found that I can still build them a little cheaper and with much
better performance, longevity and lower failure rates than we can with them
pre-build. Building them myself gives me the flexibility to cheap out on
the parts that don't matter and put more money into the parts that make the
computer perform better and that will give the computer a longer
*useful*lifespan. The last time I did a really detailed
component-by-component
comparison was maybe 6-9 months ago, comparing against a Dell computer. The
comparison showed that I could still build a computer that would either 1)
blow the pants off the other computer in performance for the same price, or
2) beat the price by a significant margin and match the performance. I
don't know how much longer it'll make sense to custom build them, but for
now, you can potentially still be better off custom building them...if you
have the wherewithal to do it!

Good luck and HTH!


______________________________
*Chad Neeper*
Senior Systems Engineer

*Level 9 Networks*
740-548-8070 (voice)
866-214-6607 (fax)

*Full LAN/WAN consulting services -- Specialized in libraries and schools*


On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 3:47 PM, Tyson Horton <hortonty at oplin.org> wrote:

> ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
>
> Looking for some input here… Currently all of our computers are Dell. We
> are going to be upgrading all of our computers and have been quoted by both
> Dell and CDWG. CDWG is quoting be Lenovo’s. I have never owned or worked
> with a Lenovo, so I am looking for your opinions on them. Their pricing is
> much more attractive, but not knowing a lot about them, I don’t know what
> to think. Any input would be greatly appreciated.****
>
> ** **
>
> Thanks,****
>
> Tyson Horton****
>
> Systems Administrator****
>
> Williams ********County****** ****Public Library**********
>
> ****107 East High Street********
>
> ****Bryan**, **OH** **43506********
>
> 419-636-6734 (voice)****
>
> 419-630-0408 (fax)****
>
> www.mywcpl.org****
>
> ** **
>
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