�Dell (well, Intel) makes frickin' boat anchors�
2004-03-18, 09:45:00:

Where I work I'm in the desktop division -- basically, we take care of the workstations, the software installations, the users, and so forth. There are two absolutes imposed on us by Network Administration:

• we can't use server-class hardware or Windows server OSes on any of our systems that are on the production network, and
• no Linux on anything.

Basically, they don't want us to compete on their turf, whatever that means. Sigh. (But I am working on that last one, though -- in a not-for-profit, you have trouble arguing against "free" sometimes.)

This means that all the web and database work I do at work I run on Windows 2000 workstation. Inefficient, but I can only work with what I've got.

Well, I have two MySQL systems, both on Dell Optiplex GX1s with 640 MB of memory. One of them is running Apache as well, and one is merely for collecting data from programs and scripts. They churn along, doing their thing not even breaking a sweat. However, the hardware is still pretty slow compared to modern hardware; we're talking P2s and 500 MHz P3 class stuff here.

We're moving some of our production equipment out of our lab and into the data center here at the corporate office, so I thought it'd be nice to get some faster hardware and consolidate down to a couple boxen, what with all the other web stuff and some of the things we're at looking in the future. To this end, I was going to take a 1.2 GHz GX150 tower I have and stuff it with memory and use that. I even approached some folks about building out Gentoo Linux box on it.

Then I found out that the chipset in the GX150 only supports 512 MB of memory. Hope that database won't be very busy!

Now realize that some of the medical imaging applications that we run around here require 256 MB minimum and this is our system standard for memory, and we're throwing around 512 MB minimum for some applications, and you can see the conundrum. In a year or so, I can see 768 MB or a gig being the minimum needed, but we have all these perfectly fast machines that can't take it and need to be replaced once we do that. Add to that the fact that we don't replace machines here until they're four or five years old, and you can get the idea.

What sucks, too, is that what we're getting in now only addresses up to a gig of memory. What is this, planned obsolescence?

The heart of the matter is this -- the Intel 810 and 815 chipsets on the motherboard. While they will often take 512 MB sticks of RAM, if you add a second it won't see it - it refuses to address more than 512 MB. Of course, Dell builds around this pile of fetid crap, also using the crappy built-in video to save a few bucks.

It's my contention that anything built to this spec is a boat anchor. Because of this, I would never recommend Dell to anybody who has plans to do more with their computer than they do when they buy it. What's even worse is that their older machines don't have this limitation, because I have two GX1s running happily with more memory than their newer models. Thus, I can only assume this is some sort of marketing decision.

Don't buy Dell, or anything else designed around crippled chipsets!