New Dell Computers

Palm Unveils iPhone Competitor, the Pre

2009-01-09T19:38:00.000-08:00

LAS VEGAS — Seeking to revive its sharply fallen fortunes and produce a successor to its aging Treo device, Palm unveiled a sleek new smartphone, the Pre, on Thursday and an exclusive partnership with Sprint to distribute it.

Palm executives say the touch-screen device and the new operating system inside it, WebOS, break new ground in the fiercely competitive smartphone market. The phone’s selling points include an emphasis on fast Web browsing and efficient multitasking.

Jonathan J. Rubinstein, executive chairman of Palm, resisted comparisons of the Pre with the iPhone from Apple.

“Our intention was never to build an iPhone killer but to build a killer Palm product,” Mr. Rubinstein said in an interview. He said he felt Palm had been fighting an uphill battle with outdated devices and software, and was doing so no longer.

“The Pre allows us to get back in the game,” he said.

Edward T. Colligan, president and chief executive of Palm, said at a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show here that the Pre would be available in the first half of the year “as soon as possible.” The company did not disclose its price.

Mr. Colligan showed off the phone’s sophisticated interface and the way it charges on a special platform without the need to attach a cable. The Pre comes with eight gigabytes of storage, GPS navigational capabilities, Wi-Fi networking and a slide-out keyboard.

For Palm, the announcement is part of an effort to reboot a company whose Treo was once synonymous with smartphones, before competitors like the iPhone and BlackBerry surpassed it. It not only wants to catch up in the phone market, it wants to set a new bar. But it faces intense competition from companies that are vying for the same customers.

Investors welcomed the Pre’s unveiling, sending Palm’s stock up $1.15, or 35 percent, to $4.45. The stock was near $14 two years ago.

Roger Entner, a telecommunications industry analyst at Nielsen, said that while Palm had serious hurdles, his early impressions of the phone were positive. He said that if the Pre catches on, it could improve the outlook for Palm and also Sprint, which like Palm has been struggling to regain its former stature.

“If this device does really well, it gives people a reason to go to Sprint,” Mr. Entner said. “It’s one of those potentially iconic devices. The Razr, the iPhone, devices like that made people switch carriers. That’s what Sprint is hoping for.”

Daniel R. Hesse, the chief executive of Sprint, said at the press conference that Sprint had the most dependable high-speed data network, an apparent swipe at the problems iPhone users have had with AT&T’s network.

Industry analysts have been skeptical of Palm’s ability to revive its reputation and market share. In the United States, phones that use the current Palm operating system make up about 14 percent of smartphones in use, putting Palm fourth behind the BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, Windows-based phones and the iPhone, according to the marketing research firm comScore.

The company’s financial fortunes have soured too. In its second fiscal quarter, which ended Nov. 28, its sales of smartphones were $171 million, down 39 percent from a year ago. Excluding one-time charges, its quarterly losses soared to $80.2 million, up from $7.8 million the year earlier.

Palm has not had much luck with its recent efforts to innovate. In 2007 it announced that it would build the Foleo, a kind of smartphone accessory in the form of a laptop, but it canceled the project within a few months.

Analysts say Palm could have trouble getting outside software developers to create programs that will work on its WebOS phones. Developers are now heavily focused on BlackBerry devices and the iPhone because the number of people using them is large and growing.

The developers have become more crucial to the success of mobile phones because they can enrich the devices by adding all kinds of functions like games and navigation services.

“The essence of what is going to make or break a Palm platform is whether or not you can get developers committed to it,” said Ken Dulaney, a mobile computing analyst with Gartner, the information technology research company.

Another challenge is economics. People are less likely to spend money to upgrade to a fancy new gadget if they are keeping an eye on their bank balance.

Roger McNamee, a Palm board member and a major investor in the company, acknowledged that economic conditions were not ideal, but he added that he thought the size of the mobile phone market left plenty of room.

“Given the economy, a perfect outcome would be a critically acclaimed start followed by something like the early days of the iPod, where every buyer loved the product, but unit volumes started small and grew with time,” Mr. McNamee said. “In the 1.2-billion-unit cellphone market, you don’t need much market share to generate billions in revenues.”

Mr. McNamee is a founder of Elevation Partners, an investment firm that last year invested $325 million in Palm. This month it agreed to invest $50 million to $100 million more, which could bring its stake in Palm to as much as 40 percent.

Mr. McNamee said he believed that the new Palm platform represented a fundamental improvement over that of the iPhone and BlackBerry. Because it emphasizes on-the-go browsing and multitasking, he said, it is better suited for a mobile device.

“Apple’s Mac OS X is about eight years old, and the BlackBerry platform is more than a decade old,” he said. “Palm’s platform is brand new. A new platform gives us the opportunity to innovate the way Google does. This product is just the starting point.”

Dell computers service

2008-12-02T07:33:00.000-08:00

When I purchased my computer I was informed that I would receive a coupon for $100 of Dell products. When I didn't receive coupon I contacted customer service who e-mailed it to me. The coupon listed a code and conditions but Absolutely nothing about expiration! When I tried to use it I was told that it was expired. I offered to forward the e-mail when they insisted that it listed 120 days under terms and conditions but they refused. Code was within 120 days based on the e-mail date.

After 3-1/2 hours on the phone I get the customer care manager, Nadeesh who states that it was their fault but they can't re-issue coupon codes so sorry. He said that he would forward my comments to his manager who will not contact me as he was th highest person in the Dell corporation that I could speak to. i ,should list to them to ie

Besides the time on the phone. I lost $100 that was to be for my 7 year old's Christmas gift. I also no longer want to purchase Anything from this coupon even though my computer needs speakers.

Janis of Turlock CA (11/30/08)
I bought a brand new 1536 Studio Laptop October 3, 2008 it died 20 days later. Called Dell customer Service in India and discovered lie after lie then hung up on several times after being on hold for approximately 20 minutes a call. I was told my laptop could not be repaired by phone until Monday as I was not the registered owner??? After speaking to 3 reps and a floor mgr the following week, I received an empty box from Dell. Packed the laptop and sent it back for repair.

after 2 more weeks I called Dell again but told my repaired laptop had been sent to an unknown address in a entirely different city. I was asked to wait 7 to 10 days for them to find it. I said no and asked for a refund. I then had to wait for someone higher to call me in 48 hours. I was called and told a new laptop was being sent on Friday to arrive on that monday. No delivery and when I called back I was referred to a floor mgr Sam who left me on hold for 10 minutes then told me the original laptop had been delivered to me as they had delivery confirmation.

When I asked who signed for the delivery, I was given the runaround then hung up on. Only after threatening legal action did a escalation rep call telling me a new laptop was shipped. It arrived late and had different casing, missing the purchase offer software and the system restore has had to be completed three times since receiving. There are errors and docs of test results of obvious system failures and updates while still in Dell's possession. It was sent to me anyway, as is. I have called, emailed the escalation department and Dell's legal department. No call.

I cant go through another debate with these people. They already refused a refund although I have the receipt of purchase and not happy with their product.

John of Victoria BC (11/29/08)
I had bought several outfits from Dell as they gave a small business discount. Now that I'm a sr I wanted to do Photoshop CS3 retouching from home- for my Church- VCF and Pro photographers of Canada. I told Roman I needed a powerfull computer with lots of memory as photographs in RAW format use a lot of space. He did not listen- sent simole software CS basic instead of CS3 extended- He just sent whatever he had lying around! He sent the basic Dell tabletop which has small storage-memory Totall in adequate for the big time stuff I wished to do. I had joined NAPP-national Assoc. of Photoshop Pros. out of Florida!

I rea;ized what he sent was woefully inadequate! I couriered it back- He- Dell began to take funds from my Coast Capital account -a excellent financial institution in the West Coast. I finally got them stopped and a DO not honour any of their SIGNATURELESS Invoices which because I NEVER agreed to or had NO GOODS! are THEFT! I am writing as Coast Capital can only put a NO payment on for 3 months- and knowing Dell they will Steal AGAIN! Please use your power and put a end to these crooks!

I had much work to do and could not do any so I lost many good clients. I have lots of proof!

Gary of Berwyn PA (11/26/08)
I purchases a Dell Inspiron B130 in July 2006 timeframe. I paid extra money (approx. 140.00) to upgrade to Windows XP Professional from the base Windows XP operating system. When I received the B130 laptop there was no windows box or CD. Dell told me they did not include it and I would never need it because there is a restore feature. This is a misrepresentation because if the hard drive needs to be replaced I will need the CD. Is there an esisting class action suit I can join for this fraud perpetuated upon me by DELL?

The retail cost of windows XP Professional should I need to purchase it, approx $140.00 to $160.00.

Jackie of Kunkletown PA (11/24/08)
I had ordered a Dell computer October 1, 2008. I had received numerous emails that the computer delivery date was delayed (four times). October 17, I received another such email, October 18th, I received an email stating my order was cancelled, due to non-response. I had kept calling. I asked for my money back and I was told it would be credited in 24-48 hrs.

I figured that would be 11/19, on 11/19 I called and they said 3-5 business days, it is now 11/24 and I've called them numerous times and still no refund. Each time I speak with a non-English speaking person I am awarded nothing but argumentative action. I filled out a survey stating so. I will never buy a Dell again. And I have been a Dell customer since 2000.

Brian of Shrewsbury NJ (11/24/08)
I purchased 2 televisions from Dell off the Net it states you have 21 Days to return any item after about 17 Days I decided to return that and sent email to their returns department. I received an email back stating the 21days starts on the invoice date. Well this date is not stated anywhere on my order nor is it on the invoice I sighned from the shipper which deliver the item about 10 days after this INVOICE DATE.

I am unable to return sets and am responsible to pay for them. These sets are unagle to get ESPN HD due to the facts that they use 1080p broadcast mode. The main reason I purchased the TVs is for sports. The funnt thing is I continually advised them I was going to purchase a more expensive model to get the reception I wanted.

Lowell of Middleville MI (11/23/08)
I subcontract my computer work with a local source, even though I have bought my laptop from Dell, which was purchased in March 08. In early September 08, I had ordered a new mother board. It was scheduled to arrive around the 15th of September. Since then I keep getting the same message, sorry for your inconvenience, but your new ship date is..... and they would push the date out a week. This has gone on every week since the 1st of October.

When I called them last week, the day I recieved another notice, they again apologized and while on the phone moved it out yet another week. As a consultant to various companies, working with their IT departments, I typically recommend both hardware and software to my clients. I explain this to Dell that unless they resolve this gross disregard to fill my order, that I will no longer recommend Dell. I also mentioned that this is my Main computer for my business and need to get it back to fully operate.

I have asked to speak to someone further up and got an email from someone stating they were a supervisor, but when I returned his email, I just got a standard response and another pushed out date. My last correspondance was that I go above the manager to and executive within the corporation, and that email has been un answered for a week now, even with repeated reminders

The bottom line, I can not fully operate my business without this computer. It has my main financial software since the companies inception, and with year end coming around the corner, I am very concerned. I have had to handle invoicing, Purchase orders and customer relations all off line, which concerns me that something might get missed when I finally get my computer back and have to manually load all of the data since the end of August.

Ellen of Roopville GA (11/23/08)
I purchaced a Dell computer in Feb 2005 and gave a little less than $2000.00 for it.I cannot find the origional purchace paperwork.I called to get the payoff price and they are saying that I owe them $2618.52 on payoff.I am getting charged $55.47 finance charge a month plus $39.00 late fee which I haven't paid a payment for 2 months because I have been trying to resolve the payoff balance which is far more than I origionally purchaced the computer for.

The total payments was supposed to be for 24mts at $79.00 per mth and we added the credit protection plan for $21.52 which the customer service person said was recently taken off because of non payment and payments are now back to $79.00.I have tried to talk to thease people to give me a reasonable payoff price but keep getting the run around and cannot talk to anyone except the financial department and I get the same story everytime.I think that I shouldn't even owe dell anything after paying them since Feb.2005.

Sheri of Concord CA (11/22/08)
I have had nothing but problems with my Dell Notebook for almost a year. I have been without my computer as much as I have been with it. They have deemed the problem unfixable and offered me a refurbished computer without any warranty that is worth 1/3 of what I paid for mine and has less then 1/2 the amenities and functionality I was sold on originally. Initially I declined. But I am unable to operate my seasonal business of selling my photography that I only sell during Holiday seasons.

I can not even prep my photos taken over this last year to get them ready to sell nor offer them without my computer. So I called back to accept the replacement that I am not happy with and now I am getting the run around. I need help. Even if I get the replacement it is too late and has cost me more then what I paid initially in time, frustration and operation of my hobby business. I need help getting my money back for the difference in what they are replacing with and what I paid. Initially, I sunk almost $4500 into my initial order to get an refurbished computer that sales new for $1200.

STRESS STRESS STRESS. Entire weekends with hours and hours on end on the phone. Loss of my computer for my hobby business and leisure time. IF they replace my computer, loss of about $3000 just in material differences AT LEAST, considering they are replacing with a refurbished computer that may or may not need a warranty without one, most likely I am loosing even more materially.

Josh of Los Angeles CA (11/21/08)
I ordered a laptop from Dell on 11/1, which originally was to ship 11/10. The order has now been delayed four separate times, with my current delivery date estimated around 12/1. I called their customer service for an explanation on two separate occasions, and they were unable to give me any information on why the computer was continually being delayed. Their sales customer service is absolutely useless; they have no information about anything and they are completely unwilling to offer any concessions to placate customers such as myself whom they have been continually and intentionally misleading.

In fact, when I suggested that Dell should offer a shipping upgrade in return for lying to me about when my laptop would ship, the woman suggested that I should just be happy because I was getting a good deal. Dell has no respect for its customers or for proper business practices, and I will never purchase anything from them again in the future.

Gen of Brooklyn NY (11/20/08)
I have been trying for the last 2 months to get someone from Dell to confirm that they recieved the adapter I returned and that I would be refunded the amount I paid. The adapter does not work in my Dell computer even though I purchased it directly from Dell for my specific computer. In addition, it does not charge my battery. I have never been more frustrated with a customer service department. No one would answer any in October I tried calling at least 15 TIMES and could not get through to anyone who could assist me.

Today, I tried again. I spoke to no less than 4 agents who kept telling me they could not assist me and transferred my call. I finally spoke with the fifth agent who explained that I have to seek approval from Dell before I returned the adapter. This I did not know before I returned the product, of course. When I asked why the product was not returned to me if Dell was refusing it and requested that I be tranferred to a manager he informed me that no manager was there and that I would AGAIN have to call back. As I was explaining my frustration to the agent he proceeded to hang up on me. No-one even bothered to confirm that the adapter was indeed returned.

I will never purchase another Dell computer. Since purchasing my first Dell three years ago, I have had to purchase several adapters and have had to replace the battery at least once. What I was expecting from a company of Dell's size is definitely not the service or product I recieved. I still have no adapter to charge my battery and the screen just went black this week.

Dell has been billing me for this adapter and has threatended to send my account to a collection agency. I am now out the cost of the adpater plus the interest rate (and the late fee because I stupidly thought Dell would automatically refund the amount back to me like any other company would) - around $100.

Jim of Bedford NH (11/20/08)
I purchased 5 1TB External Hard Drives from Dell on 11/08 for $175 a pice, and went back on 11/18 to make another purchase only to find out the exact hard drives I bought were now $160 a piece. I thought this would be no big deal as what company doesn't price match their own products within 30 days? Well I was wrong.

I called twice and was connected to 2 women I could not understand cause their english was terrible. They both told me they refused to refund the $75 dollars, and hung up on me when I asked to speak to a supervisor. I have bought 2 computers and spent over 5 grand with Dell since 2002, and Because of the principal of them refusing to pricematch $75, they will lose my business forever. Avoid this company as their customer service is the worst I've experienced.

Sue of Walled Lake MI (11/19/08)
I bought my grandson a Dell laptop online from Dell, Inc. for college. It cost almost $2000. After 3 months, the computer died. Called customer support at Dell- talked to many,many people with thick accents (hard to understand.) Dell sent a service repair guy to house - he couldn't fix it. Dell supplied a box to have it shipped to repair center in Houston. After two weeks or so, and many inquiries, we were told that there was a liquid spill and the motherboard would have to be replaced at our cost. My grandson was VERY carefull with the computer, never let anyone use it but him, and swears that he did not spill anything on it.

I tried to reason with Dell through many, many phone calls and they stubbornly refused to listen to me and kept saying there was a liquid spill and I had to pay for it. I told them to contact the service repair man who came to the house because he never said there was a spill. They said they didn't have to because their repair center said there was a spill. I wrote the president of Dell and once again, was contacted by a person with a thick accent who said he would look into it. After 5 days, he called to say There was a liquid spill and it's not covered under the warranty.

I am so sick of them, I could vomit. This is an almost new computer and we did nothing wrong to that computer. they will not accept any responsibility. I have ordered 3 computers online from them. I am a good customer and pay for them promptly. I do not understand their attitude.

With my grandson in college, he does not have the $300+ to pay for the repair of this new computer. I don't have the money. It's like we threw $2000 out the window.

Josepha of Milford CT (11/19/08)
I am being dunned by them for a purchase I never received. When you call their Texas number, you are connected to India and someone who does not speak clear English. I have sent a letter to the Dell Corporation, but received a call-back only from India. Dell does not seem to understand that not allowing customers to reach his corporation directly is one reason his sales are dropping. I plan to keep trying to get through to them IN TEXAS.

The order that I did not receive was never cancelled and no reason was given. Instead, the order, which was under $95, was turned over to a collection agency! This is NOT the way to keep customers.

Joseph of Los Angeles CA (11/18/08)
DELL sold and shipped me an Inspiron laptop over two years ago - one that I still cannot use. DELL failed to tell me that their new version of Microsoft, i.e. Microsoft's Media Center XP, was in its initial stages, filled with flaws, complaints, holes. Soon discovering this for myself - any and everytime I attempted to add security software - the computer blanked-out on me, making it un-usable. What also made the DELL Inspiron Notebook un-useable: Each and every time Microsoft did an automatic update, the computer reverted to its blankness (having restored time and again via System Restore utility feature). Leaving me with a glorified typewriter, at best.

To further antagonize the situation there have been hundreds of calls, emails, tech support conversations that have left me literally speechless out of frustration and disbelief. Throw in the callousness of DELL CUSTOMER CARE agent Jerry, and a nincompoop at DELL FINANCIAL SERVICES named Jessica (who wouldn't provide her last name - refused). -and we're talking over two years of complete lunacy. They've promised updates, fixes, relief, everything involving the spoken word - while not accepting the laptop back nor crediting my account the fifteen hundred dollars. It's the worst (and historically only) issue I've ever had with a big company, and it defies common sense, rationale.

DELL doesn't even PRETEND to care. If you don't like it - fine - they'll just turn you over to their own in-house collection agency - and/or the many 3rd party collection agencies they use to harass similar customers and complaints. Microsofts' Media Center XP is a wash, everyone knows it, everyone's complained about it - DELL's attitude (and apparent corporate philosophy) is, Hey, We Just Sell 'Em!

Can't use the product - they won't accept the product back/and-or offer any reasonable accomodation. Two years of migraines, collection agencies, a complete DELL nightmare.

Deanna of Cumming GA (11/18/08)
I purchased a lap top from Dell 9 months ago for the ability to burn DVD's I have burned approximately 3-4 DVD's and the lap top's burner is defective. I spent over an hour with Dell's Technical Support to discover the problem and was informed that the computer is still under Warranty and a replacement part would be sent to me. I went out of town before the part arrived! I received an email telling me that I must return the broken part within 15 days and if I am unable to do this I need to call customer service and ask for an extension!

I called customer service was on the phone for over an hour, and spoke to 4 different people! The last person informed me he needed to transfer me to a 5th person when I said No I was informed that I would be required to pay for the part if I did not mail the part back within 15 days and I needed to speak to yet another person to do this. I told the gentleman No, I had already told 4 different people that the part would be returned to Del, but after the 15 day's and to have a nice day and hung up.

I was informed that Dell would seek monetary compensation because the part will not be back to Dell within 15 days. They have made it impossible to get an extension, even though their email says I to request one. I will not be paying for a warranty part, Dell can have the broken part but will receive it after the 15 days! I have done my part to inform them! I have also informed them they have lost a customer! I do not know the monetary damage yet but was informed I would be billed.

Nina of Louisville KY (11/18/08)
Sold a faulty COmputer. Will not replace. They havr records of problem starting back as early as 3 months after it was purchased.

Computer has crashed 7 times resulting in loss of downloads necessary for school that were purchased x7 times. music that has been purchased 7 x's Papers/school material resulting in loss of grade, when computer crashed

Raymond of Jewell IA (11/16/08)
Put in a online order for a lap top dell told me I already had an account with them. I told them no I didn't I had just graduated from high school and was going to college. This was the first time I had bought anything. They told me a woman had an acount with my social security number and that they could not give me any more information. They won't give me the fraud dept. address, won't let me talk to anyone about the situation. I just keep getting tansferred from one dept to another and hear the same thing I'll transfer you we can't help you.

How can they give a person an account with another persons ss number. It is a woman who lives in Texas and I live in Iowa. I can't get anything on credit because of the freeze on my credit and I have never bought anything on credit.

Karen of Fort Jones CA (11/15/08)
I had bought two computer systems, then ordered two additional internal harddrives for those systems. They dod state that they have a return policy limit of 21 days. They sent me two incorrect harddrives (they were not compatible with the systems). I did not even discover this as I did ot try to install them for almost a year later. The reason for this was that I had shortly after having received them, I discovered a recurrence of breast cancer with much surgery and treatment required, then had neck surgery, then had a back that went out (making it difficult to get on the floor) and then my daughter died.

Despite my explanation of all of this, Dell refuses to refund the money for the two incompatible harddrives. I have talked with supervisors who say they have no exceptions to the rule - and they refuse to give any inormation as to how I might contact the corporate offices for the team of Michael Dell. While I understand the rule, I feel that since I have ordered so much from them (including extended warranties) and because of the extraordinary circumstances, they should (to keep good customer relationships) make an exception to their rule.

The cost of the two hard drives came to only $300.00, but given that I am on an extremely limited income, $1500.00 per month, that for me is a huge amount of money.

Michael of Birmingham AL (11/14/08)
When I experienced a massive failure on my Dell Inspiron 1520 in April of this year, Dell was so slow to respond to my request for warranty service that I had no choice but to purchase a replacement computer and reconstruct lost data. This cost me hundreds of dollars and hours of wasted time. Weeks went by before Dell showed any concern at all to help me and, again, my computer was still under warranty. Dell does not recognize that many of its customers have limited computer experience and are uncomfortable trying to resolve an issue over the telephone with someone on the other side of the planet whose accent is difficult to understand. Neither does Dell offer local authorized warranty service centers. Their solution is to package the computer in a box and ship it off somewhere. This is unacceptable for people who rely on their computers on a daily basis.

On several occasions, automatically downloaded Windows Vista updates have rendered my Inspiron computer inoperable, and I needed the assistance of a computer whiz to straighten out the problem. This has never occurred even once with the inexpensive Toshiba computer that I purchased as a replacement. Months ago Microsoft issued an SP-1 Vista update to resolve Vista-related problems. Dells support page advised that three other Microsoft updates were required prior to downloading SP-1. Following Dells directions, I went to Windows Update and downloaded two of the three required updates without any problems.

However, when I attempted to download the third required update, a message from Microsoft stated that the update in question did not apply to my computer contrary to Dells support page and wouldnt allow it to be downloaded. As a result, my Inspiron 1520 cannot be updated to Vistas SP-1 update. It comes as no surprise that I experienced no difficulty at all updating the Toshiba replacement to SP-1.

I now have a worthless, unreliable Dell computer that reboots unexpectedly and loses data, cannot be updated to current Windows Vista standards, and has cost me countless hours of wasted time and hundreds of dollars. Dell has offered technical support, finally, after almost six months, but reminds me that the computer is now out of warranty. Of course its now out of warranty! Dell waited six months to address the issue!

Tan of Kl OTHER (11/14/08)
I own two Dell's laptop; one purchased once upon a time and still alive and kicking, and another one purchased 2 years ago which had given me a headache on arrival. The laptop simply refused to boot up, and after successful booting up, it refused to shut down. Okay, I called the Dell's support and the chap over there informed me that he would send someone over to repair my laptop. I told the chap off and that I didn't expect this kind of service from Dell and I got quite a good experience with my old Dell's laptop. After a long negotiation he finally agreed to send a new replacement unit for me.

Then, finally after 2 years, another problem emerged recently. The bezel surrounding my LCD suddently cracked and bulged with some plastic pieces falling out (when I tried to close it as usual); now, the LCD can no longer be closed. Since I had signed up for the 3-year warranty programme, I comfortably called up the service department and see what can they do. It ended up with a disappointment as the service chap told me that this problem falls under the category of wear and tear and is not covered under the warranty. I was told to read through the conditions of the warranty when arguing out my case.

According to the chap, the warranty only covers the functional hardware of the laptop, i.e. only the parts that will affect the functions of the laptop such as faulty LCD, is covered. I asked the chap since now the LCD of my laptop can no longer be closed can this be considered as a functional problem and that I don't know if Dell's has designed a laptop with a LCD that cannot be closed as a functional laptop.

I was really frustrated with the service and the lousy excuse that the problem is considered as wear-and-tear. I would not have gone for the 3-year extended warranty should I been made known that the plactic parts of a Dell's laptop cannot last any longer than 3-years and in the very likely even that the pastic parts crack by itself, it is not covered under the warranty. Why on earth I should opt for 3-year extended warranty whilst the plastic part of the laptop cannot last any longer than 3 years under ordinary usage (off working hour use only)? I really cannot figure this out. This laptop is my second from Dell and I don't see why I should get the 3rd one from this company anymore.

Ray of Philadelphia PA (11/13/08)
Dell Dollars are NOT US Dollars, yet. After making a purchase with Dell Dollar coupon I could not correct an ordering mistake without losing the entire value of the coupon. The coupon was provided as an incentive for purchasing a new computer. When asking to talk to an English speaking manager, they required a $5 fee to be paid.

Mike of St Paul MN (11/13/08)
I ordered a Dell Studio laptop through the Dell Outlet in August. At the time, I was serving with the US Army in Iraq. About 6 weeks after the laptop had supposedly shipped, I returned home to the US, without a laptop. Several emails to Dell only got the response Shipments to APO addresses take 45-60 days. This was surprising, considering that the average shipping time from EVERY OTHER COMPANY I ordered from was around 8-10 days.

At the 60 day mark, my coworkers that were still in Iraq informed me that the laptop still had not arrived, and I contacted Dell again. The first person I dealt with via email told me the following: Thank you for your patience. I am in touch with the logistics team. The person concerned is out of office and will be back by 10-30-08. I have sent him a reminder today to respond on priority basis. I request your patience while I am working on your issue. I never heard back from him. I then filed a submission of a Missing Item and received a response back that a replacement order would be shipped.

After a week, nothing had updated online under my dell account, so I contacted them via phone. I was told that it would take up to 16 days to get a replacement shipped. Less than a week later, I received a Dell laptop. According to the newly updated account online, this was a more expensive laptop than the one I had ordered. Unfortunately, it's specifications were less than what I had purchased. I had purchased a laptop with a blue-ray drive, and received one with only a DVD-RW drive. Also, and even more frustrating, my account shows that my warranty period started 3 MONTHS ago. I am 3 months into my warranty on a laptop by the time I receive it?

I found out after I submitted my order that several other military personnel had problems with Dell shipments. If I would have known in advance that my laptop was not likely to arive in a timely manner, I never would have made the order in the first place. I was out over $1500 for over 2 months with nothing to show for it. I purchased that particular laptop primarily for it's blue-ray drive (about a $300 option) and received one without. I also lost 3 months of warranty time and went without a functional laptop for almost 3 months.

Gweneth of Poughkeepsie NY (11/12/08)
I purchase a p.c.(dimension 3000) back in February of 2006 during a $350 promotion. At the time of ordering i am quite sure i requested that my p.c. has cd/dvd burning capabilities, along with other software which amounted to another $350. I received my order and upon trying to copy cd i could not. I called the company's customer service who apologized but insisted that i did not order the cd/dvd burner, adding that it would have cost me more if i did. I remained adamant that i did and the agent told me, again that he was sorry, and that as a concession the company would give me a $50.00 coupon towards the purchase of an external burner, if i made the purchase from them.

I did locate one which would not cost me too much if i could apply the discount. However i was never able to apply the discount to the purchase. I tried various way of doing so and ultimately called back customer service. I was given the run-a-round, basically telling me that i have to make the purchase and put the reference # from the discount on the order. It never happened and after several calls to try and rectify the matter i gave up. I still love the company and the product but i still feel like i was cheated out of my software.

Basically inconvenience as i have to ask others to copy things for me if i so desire.

Janet of Margate FL (11/12/08)
I bought three Dell Inspiron 1525 computers less than six months ago and now I have learned that the fax modems that came with the laptops cannot be used if you have Windows Vista Premium os. No where on Dell's website when I was ordering the laptops did it state the fax modem function that came pre-installed for an extra charge could NOT be used with Vista Premium OS!

Now I'll have to pay $149 for each laptop to upgrade to Vista Ultimate if I want to use the fax modem. Why would Dell sell a fax modem laptop with Vista Premium os if they knew it does not work together? At least why did they not let me know?

Alice of Trussville AL (11/11/08)
I ordered a Dell Computer October 14. My order was delayed twice then canceled. I received an email stating it was canceled on Nov 11. I am told it was not filled because I did something wrong when placing the order. If I did , why did I receive an order confirmation, or why was a phone call not placed to me? I called and was treated rudely by several representatives. I am a repeat customer and was on hold or transferred incorrectly for over an hour. The last person was the worst, the person I was transferred to in Customer Service.

When I asked for a manager in Customer Service she told me that there was no one available to speak with. I was not given a name at my request in which to voice my concerns. The background noise was ridiculous in sales. I was transferred several times to financial services where I did not need to be, and the impersonal way you deal with repeat customers assures me I will be finding a new dealer for my next PC's.

I feel terrible about continuing business with people who do not value my business. One of the last persons told me it did not matter if I reordered or went to Best Buy and bought a computer, it was up to me. I have been jerked around so badly that it would have been reasonable to receive a discount for my delays and trouble, or at least a name and address of someone to which I could voice my concerns. Please let me know who I might speak with over this slap-in-the-face experience.

Sarah of Dallas GA (11/11/08)
I did not get an e-mail confirmation from Dell after ordering my computer. I called this morning to have it e-mailed to me. While reviewing the order confirmation I noticed the amount charged was different from the amount I was told while placing my order. I started to question why that was the case and was not giving an answer instead I was transfered to 10 different people. I was transfered to departments that could not even help me. I asked to speak to the Sales department and was not connected through to a live human.

I find it interesting that when placing an order Dell can having someone talk to you within seconds. However, when you have a problem no one can help you. I've been on the phone for over an hour trying to get an explaination as to why I'm charged a different amount. I still don't have an answer. I had to hang up since I was getting so upset. IN TEARS and needed to walk away. This is insane that a company will make their customers feel this way.

The sad thing is that I really like DELL computers. However the Poor customer service will probably prevent me from ever buying a Dell Computer again regardless of the sales price.

James of West Suffield CT (11/11/08)
I have been a loyal Dell customer since 2002. To date my desktop has crashed and hardly works and my first laptop's screen went black after just 3 years. After my first laptop went out I purchased a new Studio 15 this past August. I was off to a rocky start getting going with it. I attributed much of that to Vista and swore I would be patient. Just as I was working through the learning curve/glitches patiently my laptop, along with my whole travel bag was stolen out of my car. I figured I would contact Dell to see if I can transer my service plan over to a new computer or get reimbursed for it. After all, I purchased it through 2010 and only got 2 months out of it before my computer was stolen.

I was told by a customer service agent that my service plan is non-transferable and non-refundable. I have since asked to be transferred to a manager. I am currently on hold for 1 hour and counting, waiting for a Dell customer service manager. I called previously and spent over an hour getting transferred back & forth between departments and was hung up on 3 times.

I am a business owner and have very little free time. Spending over 2 hours on a matter that should take 10-15 minutes is not what I expected as a loyal customer. There has been no offer to assist me in my troubles and I doubt that anyone has the desire or ability to do so. As I reflect on my buying experience, I have to say that Dell spends way more time on training their sales team than they do with their customer service or tech support teams. This has been the worst customer service experience of my life!

Dell is making the situation worse instead of better. I have lost approximately $200 on the purchase of this service plan. In addition, I have wasted precious time trying to get answers to no avail. This will continue to have an impact on me since not only do I not have a working computer but I have lost time and money I will never recover.

Kami of Greenwood CA (11/11/08)
Bait & Switch tactics. I saw an XBOX 360 system for a good price. I called customer service and was ASSURED that the item was in stock and would arrive at my home in 3-5 days. The next day after I placed the order I received an e-mail stating it would be delayed by 3 weeks! I immediately called to cancel the order but got some tape-recorded voicemail and couldn't reach a live person. Then I e-mailed Dell and they are ignoring my e-mails to cancel.

Luckily, I paid by Visa and can have Visa revoke the charge. However, this is a great big hassle and time-wasting inconvenience. I feel Dell deliberately LIES to their customers just so they can get the order. This was the first time I ever bought anything from Dell and it will definitely be the LAST. I am going to tell every friend and relative I know about this classic bait & switch game & tell them not to buy from Dell either.

Time-wasting inconvenience.

Catina of White House TN (11/08/08)
I used my bank debit card to purchase a dell laptop. I was told my computer would be ready in a couple weeks, The weeks turned into over a mont. I called and called and still no lap top I called to cancle the laptop and put in a cancelation of payment. I waited for my money to be credited back into my account.The rep I talked to said it was put in to have it credited to my bank account.This was a month ago and after many calls to dell from myself and my bank saying it hasn't been credited back yet.

I have been thru hell with these people and still no money back and they don't seem to care at all. Over 800.00 of my money they have and haven't returned as of yet. It has been 2 months since I ordered my laptop and as many times as I have called and tried to get my money I am still fighting for my money.

I am a single mother and worked hard to save this money to get a laptop for myself and 11 year old son to use for homework purposes and entertainment. I am not a rich person and this has put me in a bad financial and stressful situation. I would never have thought I would have to go through what I have gone through and still haven't recieved my money back.

I have even called Dell on a 3 way call with them and my bank. My bank exsplained they didn't credit back my money after I cancled my order and they still want work with me to get this big problem resolved.

Patricia of Denton TX (11/07/08)
I JUST NEED TO RETURN A PRODUCT -- I've spent close to $3000 with Dell in 60 days. I need to return a $60 product. I can't get anyone that understands English. I've bought my last Dell product.

Isaac of Rio De Janeiro OTHER (11/06/08)
I bought a Dell Inspiron 9400 computer in Ireland specifically by the reason of the world wide support offered by Dell. Now, Im living in Brazil and my laptop had some problems in the graphic card and when I try to contact Dell to replace the dammaged part, the customer services dept just say that since this computer was not bought in Brazil they cannot fix it.

Im having difficulties to find the replacement for the graphic card in Brazil. And even in the US this card is very expensive to ship it. Im very disappointed with the fake propaganda of the Dell World Wide Support.

Many unread emails for several weeks due to the problem in the graphic card and many and some project for my job could not be done by the same reason.

Karol of Fairfield CA (11/05/08)
Person used my Dell account to purchase 3 to 4 Dell laptops. I cant get ahold of anybody to clear this mess

MY ACCOUNT IDENTATY WAS STOLEN

Lisa of Saco ME (11/05/08)
I ordered 2 dell computers on 09/07/2008 and was given an estimated ship date of 09/29/08. On 09/29/08 I was sent an email that my order was delayed and new estimated ship date was now 10-27-08, I replied that this delay was OK but still wanted to be notified of any future delays. (I never dreamed it would be delayed any further)

On 10-27-08 I had not received any notification from Dell so I logged on only to find out they had a new estimated ship date of 11-3-08 again on 11-03-08 I had not received any email from Dell so I logged on and once again I was shocked to see they had a new revised estimated ship date of 11/24/08.

On 11/05/08 I contacted Dell to ask about a reason for delay and that I had not been notified of the past 2 delays, I was told that they were sorry for the delay but could offer any answers. All I want is my computers but was told they don't expect any more delays but can't guarantee that there won't be any. Isn't Dell require by law to notify me of all delays?

delays in order without consumer notification

S of Woodford Green OTHER (11/05/08)
It was relatively easy to order my new dell computer, but their delivery service leaves much to be desired, there was a garbled message left on my that was unclear, so I used my initiative as they didnt leave a number and found one eventually, called the number re-arranged the deliver for a week day, was told it would be a 5 hour delivery slot, I got someone to come round and wait for the computer to arrive, nothing came, now I am going to cancel it and take my business elsewhere.

Michael of Tavernier FL (11/04/08)
In mid Aug.08 I ordered a laptop for my daughter. I was told it would take up to 6 weeks. On the date delivery was to take place (6 weeks) I was notified the order was cancelled due to Dept.Of Consumer Affairs rule. I called back on that day. After a long call because I had to give all info. again, at times on hold, I asked if because of the first order being cancelled by DELL because they didnt have a color that I requested, if they would prioritize my order. I was told more than likely it would happen, however it could take up til 3 weeks.

I received email confirmation that gave a delivery date of Nov.3. I called about the priority and of course after going thru nemerous different people, put on hold, and talking to someone in INDIA, I was told Nov 3rd was the date. On Nov.3rd I checked on status to find order was cancelled AGAIN. After another long phone call, I'm told there was no reason given for cancellation.

I sent emails of my disappointment. I get a standard reply of apology with the tel.number to REORDER. Id sooner shoot myself. I call my daughter.She then goes to BEST BUY and finds the DELL laptop for less money and more gigs. Fortunatly she called me first before buying. I instructed her to shop for a different name OTHER THAN DELL.

Nelly of Washington Dc DC (11/03/08)
I bought a $1700 Dell laptop with all the latest gadgets. The next day after I received the unit, it crashed 2 times. I called and I was issued another one, that also kept on crashing. Because I was going on vacation out of the country, I did not call tech support for 3 months. Back to the states, I called many times and each time, I was walked through some procedures to have the problem fixed. But still the laptop kept on crashing. They had my system restored twice, and of course the problem persisted. I the kept on calling insisting to have another unit and I kept being sent to techs who would not think I needed a new system but yet could not fix the issue. This aggravated me so much that I ask to speak to managers but never was actually put in touch with one.

I have spent $2000 on this laptop and I am not enjoying it. For that price I should have gotten a Mac. This laptop crashes everyday and a $300 warranty bought cannot fix the problem nor have me issued another unit. This is the last time I am ever buying anything Dell. I NOW SPEND MY TIME GIVING DELL A BAD NAME AND I WILL NOT STOP DOING SO.

I HAVE LOST COUNTLESS HOURS OF PHONE USAGE ARGUING WITH DELL REPS AND TECHNICIANS. I HAVE A LAPTOP THAT CRASHES AT WILL.

William of Nesconset NY (11/02/08)
troubleshooting instructions which over half the links did not even work. And after that they sent me the notification to pick up the product to be fixed to a different email address (my fathers whom the account is under). After weeks of having to deal with their distasteful customer service, I finally had sent the laptop and A/C adapter to their offices and after 2 weeks I receive it back without the A/C adapter which could just as well have been part of the problem.

Then after all this they said they could not send back to me the A/C adapter. And now that I tell them I want to return the laptop they will not even allow me to do it, instead they send me from customer service to technical support but never give me any answers and never help me with any of my problems (to date I have not been told what the original problem was).

I am very displeased with all this. My father refuses to pay for the laptop anymore because he does not want to pay for something he feels is useless. In final, my father receives two calls daily from Dell credit services in which he explains the entire scenario and does not receive any assistance to date.

We would like to return this laptop, which currently cannot be used without the A/C adapter, but Dell will not give me any credit back nor will they give me the A/C adapter. What can be done? Your assistance on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

unable to use laptop for school or work purpouses.

Steven of Merritt Island FL (11/02/08)
I have a 24 inch $600 dollar monitor I purchased from Dell in 1/07 with a 3 year warranty. The stand stopped working today after I heard a click during an adjustment.

After at least 1 hour of customer service time on the phone, I was told that this fell under accidental warranty coverage. They offered nothing. That's the last Dell product I'll buy.

waste of money. terrible service

Franki of Coalinga CA (10/31/08)
A student in our program ordered a laptop on 9/23 on three separate occasions her order was cancelled with no explanation. I then became involved and learned financial services kept cancelling her order because the number she left did not have voice mail. They said they cleared this issue and her order was now ready to be handled 10/15. The gentleman we spoke with in financial services Derek said she would receive priority and receive her laptop in a week.

After a week and a half passed we tried to contact dered and when dialing his extention the line would disconnect and no one else from financial services could locate him from the notes or any other history. 10/27 with no computer still I called for a supervisor; we were put on hold for lengths of time and were told when he returned to the line that someone would be contacting us within 36 hours.

10/28 the student came back to my office and said she received an email her order had been cancelled agian. I tried to reach the supervisor we had spoken to the day before to no avail. Same thing when I dial the extention directly the line disconnects upon transferring. When I reached someone at customer service and gave both the case # from the day before and our order number. They could see that the order had been cancelled but could not see why.

This student went nearly a month without a computer. Because she believed one to be coming from Dell she did not go out and purchase elsewhere. The international student is now more timid and hesitant than before.

Soraida of Chicago IL (10/31/08)
i bought acomputer at walmart i had a quarteed for a year. i called dell lots of time they still dont want to fix. i talked to manger where are bought it theytold me i had t9o talked to dell. i did in mz=any occasion they still do not want to fix it can you help me.

the computer has a memory prolobem windows will not load up.

Michael of Hunt Valley MD (10/28/08)
I purchased a Dell B130 laptop in November 2006. The motherboard failed in 2007 and was replaced under warranty. Now, in year two, the motherboard has failed again. Dell wants $358 to repair a $499 laptop. I did the Dell shuffle for three- (3) days, appealing to their values Dell can build the right relationships which went no where. NEVER again will I specify nor procure Dell products, at home or in the office.

They won't stand behind their product and the customer service staff follow a script which cannot be deviated from. Maybe if I spoke with a heavy Indian accent I could have communicated my concerns better!

Judy of Manhattan Beach CA (10/28/08)
I needed a new laptop for demos and training, etc. I purchased the Dell XPS 2010 laptop in November 2007 because it had a large display and a removable keyboard. The computer has never worked properly. Each time I took it to a demo or training it would not boot up or it would have other issues related to the blue tooth design. I have called Dell numerous times. I talked with Customer Care. I talked with Customer support for hours. They could not fix the problems. They sent out parts, and that did not fix the problem. They sent out two technicians. The first one did not know how to fix the problems. The second technician was good. After he left, I did not have a need to use the computer for a couple of weeks (as the laptop was not my main computer).

I took it to yet another demo, and it would not boot up. It is 11 months old. I knew I had to get it returned within the year. Dell tells me I had to return it within 21 days--that would have been accpetable if it had been my main computer. I may have figured out how bad it was within 21 days. I also don't have hours and days to deal with the loop of people Dell puts you through. It is unbelievable. No one has any authority. Everyone is sorry. They just keep passing you around. I do not return things as a rule, but this computer is a big lemon. I spent over $2500 to say nothing about another $500 for my own technician to try to fix it and countless hours with Dell on the phone (billable time).

I am out of pocket for the cost of the computer $2,556.79, plus $550 for technical support, plus hours of time with Dell customer care and technical support who could not resolve anything.

Keith of Virginia Beach VA (10/27/08)
I am a student who ordered a laptop from Dell. They overcharged me by adding a part that i did not order and had no use for. The computer was also defective in numerous ways from the start.

After negotiating a return and credit to have the part removed and the computer worked on, I now call Dell about the matter who literally said so sorry, we sent you an email saying that we needed your computer returned within 48 hours or we would cancel your authorization, but we sent it to the wrong email address (though they had my correct one on file from the back and forth emails), but you should have gotten back to us anyway and this is your fault so we won't resolve this.

They told me that i would not be getting any refund and then the person i was talking with said he would not argue with me anymore and hung up on me.

I am now a poor student stuck making payments on a computer that was both defective to begin with, and was shipped to me with parts that I specifically did not include after they (intentionally, i believe) screwed me into waiting past a deadline that they never communicated to me.

Rebecca of Roslindale MA (10/26/08)
I purchased a Dell Dimension 9200 in December 2006. I did not set it up until January 2007. Almost immediately, the hard drive failed. Dell replaced it. Within the month, the 2nd hard drive failed. Dell replaced it. Keep in mind I am a small business owner. With every hard drive replacement, I had to reload all my docs and applications. I spent days loading and reloading applications, docs and adjusting settings. The 2nd hard drive failed. By this time, I had a Dell 'advocate' who wanted to resolve my issues.

So, the drive was replaced the 3rd time. I told him repeatedly, I had a lemon of a PC and asked for my money back. He refused. He said he 'was sure' that it was due to hardware conflicts. I had only a Brother printer on my PC. This 3rd hard drive lasted until this past week, 1 little over a year, before it too died.

I just paid $400 to have the PC repaired. I have spent hours on the phone with Dell. Because it was not under extended warranty, I get nothing, but have now paid over $2000 and untold time on this lemon. I have had at least 6 Dells over the years; but this is the last one I will every purchase due to poor customer service and inability to take responsibility for bad products.

Lisa of Nutley NJ (10/26/08)
Purchased Inspiron 1525 Intel Pentium Dual Core T2390 For $725.00.. received it on Aug. 3rd 2008. Had the computer for less then 3 months and now the computer does not work, will not turn on...called Dell customer Service and after several attempts within a few days I finally did get someone, they told me that I had to take the computer apart too see what was wrong with it, I told I will not do such a thing,

my pc is not working and I have a 1 year warranty and they told me that they need to have someone call me back and they never did, I am in limbo and my computer does not work, and they are not standing behind there warranty I am stuck and out over $700.00 all I want is them to fix it im not asking for anything else!

Kevin of Parma OH (10/26/08)
I purchased an AC Adapter for my daughters computer. I used the Dell website and found what I wanted online. I decided to also contact one of their representatives to verify that this was the correct AC Adapter for her computer. The representative I spoke to informed me that is would work with the computer, and she then placed the order for me. I used the Dell Dollars coupon that we received for purchasing the computer. When the AC adapter arrived, we tried it out with our daughters computer... only to find that it was indeed the wrong item.

I have since made several calls to Dell Customer service and was informed by each one that the $75.00 Dell coupon could not be re-issued, that it was for a one time use only. I explained that it was a Dell representative that told me I was ordering the right item in the first place, and wanted the full amount reissued in order to order the correct item.

The representatives all apologized for the trouble, but restated that the coupon could not be reissued. On two of the calls I asked to speak to a manager, at which point I found that I was disconnected! I will never, ever puchase another Dell item as long as I live.

Nathan of Louisville KY (10/25/08)
I called customer support 10/25/08 regarding an issue I am having with my display adapter. My system was shipped 12/11/2006 with a 2 year warranty. Rose informed me that my warranty expired 8/4/08 as that was the original ORDER date of my computer. When I asked to speak with her supervisor she told me I would hear the same thing from them. I asked several times to speak with a manager and finally she put me on hold to see if someone was available. Surprisingly enough her manager, Rachel, was not available.

When I asked to hold for any manager she said if I wanted to speak with a manager I would need to call back. When I asked for another manager she refused and told me she is only allowed to transfer calls to her manager. When I asked for the name of her manager's supervisor she did not have that information. After repeated attempts to escilate the call she ended the call.

I will never by another computer from Dell. This was my sixth. I will not buy another computer from any manufactuer with overseas customer service. There is a $49 technical support fee to diagnose the issue. The cost to replace my video card would be in the neighborhood of $300.

Steve of Lima OH (10/25/08)
Called Dell Support Oct. 13-2008. My Dell computer monitor will not display. They ordered a replacement. It is now 12 days later and no monitor. I have a 4 year warranty on this system which is 11 months old. I have a case number and dispatch number.

I have made 7 or 8 calls. And all I get is one lie after another. I also got screwed out of a 200.00 rebate after trying for 8 weeks to get it. I just gave up. Dell is nothing more than lie after lie. Not being able to use my desk top. Then the amount of time on the phone.

Christi of Gilmer TX (10/24/08)
My computer was lost in the mail. I placed the originakl order on 9/27/08 and it is now 10/24/08 and still no computer. When I call to ask about it I am talked to in a very ugly tone and no one will let me speak to a supervisor. There are none available. One person hung up on me when I sais that was ok, I would hold. I should cancel the order but I really need the computer and I have already waited so long.

I have been without a computer for a month now, unable to pay my bills and I have been hung up on and treated poorly.

Carlisle of San Leandro CA (10/24/08)
I purchased a nokia N95 8GB from dell. I chatted with a representative before I made the purchase. I asked the CSR where the phone is made because it's not stated on the stats on line. The CSR said USA. 5 days after I received the phone and checked. It's made in Korea.

I chatted with a CSR again and asked the same question. Erickson,CSR, said it's made in Finland. I then told him that I recently made a purchase with dell and it's made in korea. he replied. it's okay even if it's made in korea. I then asked him where did he get the information that the phone was made in finland? he said with my colleagues I asked for the supervisor, he said that the MANAGER IS BUSY.

I called dell support and asked the same question and she said...SHE DOESN'T KNOW. I will never buy anything from DELL!

Abdullah of Newport News VA (10/24/08)
Customer Service sent a defective damaged notebook computer. The USB ports did not work until several three hour session on the phone. Customer service had me wait several times because they could not fix problem. One issue bad DVD drive speaker on notebook volume low cannot listen to movies need to have powered speakers attached to hear movie. Second issue printer was not able to print USB drive did not recognize hardware. Third issue dent on back of notebook computer.

Long hours on phone with customer service problem has not beed solved. Replaced DVD drive still not working. DVD drive doesn't see disk. Two Thousand dollar notebook worthless.

Lawrence of North Chelmsford MA (10/23/08)
I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron 530S. First issue was they sent me an email indicating a delay in shipment. I repleyed that I would give them an extra week and no more. Magically, the machine shipped the day after the original ship date. I set it up and had a problem getting to the internet. So, I called Dell support. The first thing they did was try to sell me a maintenance contract. Of course, the person I was talking to was from India and hard to understand.

The kicker is that the big deal about this $149 contract is that it would assure me that I'd get english speaking people to talk to me about problems. Now, here I am buying an American product, in America, But I have to pony up $149 to speak to an english speaking person.

After resolving my internet problem with help from Comcast, I found that my floppy drive didn't work. Sent an email to support which got me a canned email back, It essentially told me to check the floppy cable connections. So, I took the covers off, then had to pull the dvd to get to the floppy, and then found the problem. The signal cable was plugged into the floppy drive, but the power cable had never been connected. Why connect one, but not the other? Anyway, that is shoddy work!

With this and the lack of, what I call, reasonable support, I doubt that I'll ever buy any more Dell equipment.

Rachelle of Key West FL (10/23/08)
I purchased a Studio 1525 laptop at the end of July 08 the LCD screen exploded when item was turned off. Now Dell wants me to pay 400+ to replace it states item must have been dropped or hit. Item not under warranty. item was not dropped or hit by anything and in checking on other blogs mine is not the only one that is defective. Believe me if it was my fault then I would suck it up and shut up but I will leave complaints on any website blog etc that I can to warn any one not to waste their money. Now a computer that was purchased for less then 700 dollars is going to cost me more than a thousand dollars and with the customer service and [poor] product I should probly just toss it out or sell it for parts.

Now I have the burden of paying on an item that is worthless and a company who has no pride in their product. Dell definetly does not stand behind there products and does not care if a customer is satisfied or not. They should build there products with some pride and make sure they will work and charge accourdingly instead of selling cheap pieces of junk and putting the burden on customers to fix the junk they sell.

Jim of Kokomo IN (10/23/08)
I was in the proscess of buying a dell computer when i found this forum. Thank God i did. From what i have read, i would not buy one now, i instently called and canceled my order, but what was supprizing was that i got ahold of a real human that spokee good english but ill anything but a dell

Michael of Seattle WA (10/23/08)
We purchased several computers for a total exceeding $33K. We were invoiced and paid the entire balance by check in October. Dell's automated system indicates that the payment was received and credited to our account on 10/17/08. Our bank indicates the check cleared our account 10/20/08. Concurrently we are in the process of trying to close a funding transaction of approx. $16M. As part of the due diligence a routine UCC search turned up a lien filed by Dell in August when the order was placed.

We are trying to have Dell release the lien so we can close on this sixteen million dollar transaction in October. They refuse and insist on following their 21-day waiting period for the check to clear. The lien was filed without our knowledge or any forewarning.

The continuation of our software development and getting to market with our product may be substantially delayed. The economic damages in a lightning-speed market could be severe.

Damien of Knoxville TN (10/22/08)
Dell recommended a product for one of their machines and when it did not work, they would not exchange it for something that worked. They are very vague in helping and will not take ownership of an issue that they created.

$400 in a video card that is worthless coupled with $1800 in monitors that our company has to sit on.

Jordan of Rockford IL (10/21/08)
I first purchased a Microsoft XBox 360 Elite through the Dell website, for convenience and because I had good experiences with them, on August 11, 2008. I first experienced problems with my purchase within the first two weeks it was in my possession. My system was freezing, games were not playing, and my iPod wasn't working with the system as promised online. I called Dell to see what they could do to help me with the situation. What I recieved were repeated transfers between all the different types of customer service departments in a continuing vicious cycle repeatedly getting hung up on.

On my fourth attempt to call back, I asked to speak with a supervisor or manager. I was immediately discouraged from doing so, and transferred to numbers leading to full voicemails or incorrect extensions. After I spoke with 9 different customer service representatives I thought I had no recourse but to give up. I researched on the internet to see if any other consumers were having similar problems. I found that Dell has several lawsuits pending regarding their customer service and deceptive business practices. Not only that, but Microsoft has had several lawsuits about the XBox 360 failing.

I experienced similar problems with my purchase over the next 2 weeks and decided to try calling again. I recieved the exact same treatment. Finally today, I tried for my third and final evening with Dell Customer Service. I was told all of the same things except this time after being hung up on only four times I did finally get in touch with a manager. My relief was short lived as he got on the line, spoke to me like I was an idiot and told me that because I didn't call and try to send my system back by September 11, 2008 there was nothing they could do.

I informed him I've been trying to call for 2 months almost which would put me well under the warranty when I first contacted them. He said he would conference call me with the manager of the technical support department to assist in getting the issue resolved, when a tech support representative answered the customer service manager was nowhere to be found and the tech support representative promptly hung up on me.

Chris of Rochester NY (10/21/08)
I ordered a camera, the wrong one. I called customer service 30 seconds after placing the order and told them that I ordered the wronfg camera. They said to cancel the order. I said I need to change my order and they said cancel. I asked Can I do this without loosing my DELL Dollars (Coupon).Customer service told me to cancel the order and I would be able to keep my Dell Dollars. I cancelled the order and when I tried to use the coupon on another camera, they said I could not redeem it.

I have tried with no success to explain my situation and Dell told me I was S.O.L. I lost a $100.00 coupon and they refused to give me another.

Yvonne of Sarasota FL (10/20/08)
Sunday's newspaper insert Parade magazine 10/19/08 advertises the Dell Inspiron 1525 for $549 with free standard shipping. Not only does the e-value code not work but CS told me it was invalid. Then they tried to get me to pay the $25 shipping fee. This would have amounted to an extra $50 as I wanted to purchase 2 laptops.

Why advertise when you're merely gonna renege on the deal? Dell lost my sale and any future sales. I'd rather deal with a company that stands by their advertisments and Dell obviously is not that company any longer. Apparently, this isn't the first time they've done this as I've seen complaints on various sites.

Gary of Port Washington WI (10/19/08)
On 10 Oct 2008, I ordered a Studio 1535 laptop from Dell. Having found it locally two days later for a cheaper price, I called to cancel the order [since Dell stated that it could take up to 30 days for delivery. Point: Dell's return policy requires that customers return items within 3 weeks [down from 4 weeks as previously required] BUT the 3 week clock BEGINS AT THE MOMENT DELL RECEIVES THE ORDER, NOT FROM WHEN THE CUSTOMER SIGNS FOR IT AT THEIR DOOR. Therefore, it could easily take longer to deliver the item and negate the return period before the customer is allowed to return the item!

When I called to cancel the order, I was told that I must wait until delivery to arrive and then call to request an RMA number for a return. Once again, I am in jeopardy of missing the 3 week deadline! Luckily, the box arrived on the 16th of October. When I called Dell for the RMA number, I was informed that there would be a Restocking Fee of $135.00 [15% of the $900.80 purchase price]. Even though the box had NOT been opened or damaged the Return Specialist stated that the laptop could not then be resold as new. Be serious! We all know that they WILL resell it as new.

He said that it couldn't be resold as new because the computer had been personalize for me. WRONG! I ordered no additional software or optional equipment. And trust me; the cover wasn't ENGRAVED! Obviously, Dell is losing money and is trying feverishly to recoup any money possible. Clearly their lost revenue is due, in part, to their customer service. Please HELP!

Loss of time AND $135.00 even though no damage to package & package not even opened

Demetris of Apo Ae OTHER (10/18/08)
I ordered a laptop from Dell to be delivered to an APO address. The laptop was shipped of July 8th 2008. I called dell late July. They told me to call back in 4 to 6 weeks because it was an APO to give it time. I called back they told me to call back in 4 to 8 weeks. I called several times in between. The last time I call was Oct 13. They told me Dell has a 45 day period to report a missing or undeliverd item. There was nothing they could do. I could not get a refund or a replacement laptop.

They gave me a United Mail tracking number and told me to call and track my package I ask why do I have to call and track it . I am sure Dell insured the package when it was shipped. I was told sorry mammm there is nothing we could do. I said you are just goung to take my money and I dont have the product. Everyone said the exact same thing. The 45 day waite limit. I ask about the times i call before. I know they voice record every converstions

I wasted money on calling cards waiting on hold for a long period of time. I end up purchaing another laptop from a stateside store. I fill out investingaton reports with the military regarding the situation. The whole thing was stress ful trying to deal with it being in Iraq.

Dennis of Richardson TX (10/17/08)
Dell resloved my vertical line problem after I was denied service due to my laptop being outside the window of the extended warranty. I was approved for the vertical line problem repair in January of this year and received a DHL box for shipment, however I could not relinquish my machine until mid-September due to technical university research I was conducting at the time (thankfully now completed!).

Upon receipt of my tardily-sent machine, Dell's canned response was I was too late for the free fix, but $400.00 would get me a refurbished machine. I opted to have the machine sent back to me unrepaired (It was still usable - just a few lines...). I decided to turn over a few more stones at Dell and ultimately discovered the existence of a global problem escalation team, which ultimately did in fact honor the screen replacement program, along with replacing my NVIDIA graphics card (9300 with GO 6800). Now my laptop is almost good as new (they didn't replace the worn keyboard keys or buff out the scratches though).

Wonderful! My lappie works perfectly - I just installed 2 Gigs of Crucial RAM to replace the stock 1Gb. Too bad my old XPS-T500 desktop can't take DDR2... Bravo Dell - I had to dig a bit and not just give up, but you did come through in the end. Good communication and diplomacy do still occasionally work I suppose.

Kelly of Parlin NJ (10/17/08)
I purchased a Dell lap top back in DECember of 2008. IN april 2008 the AC charger was not working, I call Dell to have this AC charger replace. The rep. told me I was not under any warranty that I had to pay $80.23 which I did. Now in October this AC charge was doing the same thing not holding a charge. I then called Dell on 10/14/2008 and spoke to a Dell repersentive that informed me I was under warranty up until Jan of 2009. I then asked why was a charged back in april if I was under warranty.

I called dell on 10/16/2008 to get this issue resolved I was transfer disconnetted numberious time. to the point I gave up this took over 3 hours. All I wanted to do was speak to a manager. I then tried to call on 10/17/08 was place on hold again for over 30min and then hung up on. I called back again finaly I was put through to a Manager who now tells He will not be refunding me the money I was charged while being under warranty becouase I didn't call them within 21days. I explained to this gentleman that I would never have known I was under warranty only because I called this week to have the charge I already replaced replaced again.

Contemplating a PC Market Without I.B.M.

2008-10-06T20:15:00.000-07:00

nside Hewlett-Packard, the world's second-largest personal computer maker, executives greeted the news on Friday that I.B.M., the world's No. 3 PC maker, might be retreating from the market, with good cheer.

xecutives at Dell Computer, the largest personal computer maker, would not comment, but some industry analysts speculated that they too were smiling about I.B.M.'s decision.

Still, many in the industry were concerned that an I.B.M. withdrawal could accelerate competition in an industry where prices were already falling.

ccording to people close to the negotiations, I.B.M. is in serious discussions to sell its PC business to Lenovo, the largest maker of PC's in China - a rapidly expanding market that Hewlett-Packard and Dell covet. I.B.M. is in talks with at least one other potential buyer. Industry experts note that a sale to Lenovo may create a powerful new rival with operations based in China.

lan Promisel, an analyst at the research firm I.D.C., said a deal with Lenovo "would put up a significant roadblock to Dell and H.P.'s Asia Pacific expansion, at least potentially so." Mr. Promisel and others noted that a larger Lenovo, formerly known as Legend, could have the power to further squeeze down PC prices because of its track record as a producer of low-cost machines.

If they're able to complete a deal," Mr. Promisel said, "Lenovo is obviously going to be more aggressive on the pricing front, which could lead to a compression on price points in the industry," potentially eating into the profits of every PC maker. The price for I.B.M.'s personal computer unit is likely to be $1 billion to $2 billion. A buyer would be purchasing the blueprints to the ThinkPad, generally regarded as the world's most reliable and secure laptops.

"The ThinkPad isn't just the best machine for the price," said Richard Dougherty, director of the Envisioneering Group, a market research firm in Seaford, L.I. "It is the machine for anyone concerned about security."

buyer would presumably get the ThinkPad name and also I.B.M.'s customer list, but whether that would be worth much over time remains to be seen. According to people close to the negotiations, a buyer is also likely to get the use of I.B.M.'s brand name on PC's for a transitional period and I.B.M. may continue to sell the computers to corporate customers after the business unit is sold.

r. Dougherty said he was already hearing from I.B.M. customers fretting about a sale to a company that has specialized in low-price machines. "Customers are saying, 'Oh my God, we need to be assured we can get ThinkPad models that are just as secure and reliable, and not just a watered-down ThinkPad brand from Lenovo,'" Mr. Dougherty said.

While Hewlett and Dell may benefit from that uncertainty, they may not necessarily benefit over the long term. I.B.M.'s retreat from the PC sector may be an irreversible transition from a world where corporate workplaces have personal computers on each desktop to one where corporate offices run on centralized computer systems with simple monitors on desks known as "thin clients" that have network connections.
his transformation would tend to harm Hewlett more than Dell, industry analysts said, because Hewlett, like I.B.M., is stronger in the corporate market than Dell, which sells the bulk of its computers to consumers. I.B.M.'s potential withdrawal from the desktop computer business indicates it has concluded that growth in corporate PC sales is largely over.

If I.B.M. is getting out of the business because it can't make money, then investors will ask themselves, 'What does I.B.M. know that H.P. doesn't know?'" said Andrew Neff, an analyst with Bear Stearns.

And even for I.B.M., backing away from traditional personal computers now may not help, said Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsystems, one of I.B.M.'s top competitors.

Dell Posts Sharp Declines in Earnings and Revenue

2008-10-06T04:40:00.000-07:00

Dell’s inability to capture sales in the booming notebook computer market was reflected yesterday in its fourth-quarter financial results, which showed a sharp decline in income as well as an unusual drop in revenue.
Dell said net income fell by a third, to $673 million, or 30 cents a share, in its fourth quarter from $1.01 billion, or 43 cents a share, a year earlier.
Revenue fell 5.1 percent, to $14.4 billion, from $15.18 billion a year earlier. The last time revenue declined at Dell was in 2001, in the recession that followed the technology boom.
Wall Street analysts had been expecting Dell to report net income of 29 cents a share for the quarter that ended Feb. 2 even after it had warned in late January that earnings would be lower than analysts expected.
“We are disappointed with the company’s results, but what matters is our future plan of action,” Michael S. Dell, the chairman and chief executive, said in a statement issued after the markets closed. “We are systematically moving to increase efficiencies, improve execution and transform the company.”
Dell said its results were unaudited, preliminary and subject to restatement. It has been trying to straighten out its financial reports as it is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission over an undisclosed accounting issue. The company, based in Round Rock, Tex., did not provide year-ago comparisons or include balance sheet information in reporting results for the quarter.
The company said its internal investigations into the accounting problems had reduced income by $89 million, or 3 cents a share.
Because the company has failed to file audited results to the S.E.C. for the last three quarters, Nasdaq has threatened to delist it. But Dell said that Nasdaq had given it until May 4 to submit information before taking any action.
Dell also said that the sale of real estate added $36 million, or 1 cent a share, to earnings. The company said it did not pay $184 million in employee bonuses because of its poor performance, which added another 6 cents to earnings.
Wall Street analysts were not expecting a good quarter as evidence mounted that Dell’s personal computer sales were flagging. IDC, the technology market analysis firm, reported that Dell’s worldwide shipments in the fourth quarter dropped 8.4 percent while the overall market grew 8.7 percent. It also said Hewlett-Packard surpassed Dell as the world’s biggest PC maker as Hewlett’s shipments grew 23.8 percent in the final three months of 2006.
The problem for Dell was clearly its inability to attract consumers and business customers to its notebook computers. While the overall market for that type of portable computer boomed — 20 percent growth in the United States alone, according to Gartner, a market analysis firm — Dell had declining sales. Dell said revenue in the laptop segment fell 2 percent, to $3.8 billion, in the quarter on a 2 percent increase in shipments. Sales of desktop computers, which have slowed for all computer makers, declined 18 percent from a year earlier to $4.6 billion.
In contrast to Dell’s troubles, Hewlett-Packard reported last week that revenue from personal computers increased 17 percent in the quarter, which included the holiday selling season. Hewlett said its operating profit margins on personal computers, including laptops, increased to 4.7 percent.
Historically, Dell has had operating margins that were higher than any computer maker except Apple because Dell sells computers directly to its customers and does not have to share profit with retailers. But over the last year, those margins have slipped to 5.5 percent from more than 8.2 percent.
A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, who had been among the first to warn of Dell’s slipping margins, said he believed that Dell could return to higher margins, but that it would take 18 months to two years for a turnaround. “We believe the stock is an attractive holding for patient investors,” he said.
In the company’s statement, Mr. Dell called for investor patience. “We won’t achieve our goals overnight, but we will achieve our goals,” he said. “We will be known again for strong operating and financial performance and a great experience for our customers. But it will take time to realize the future benefits of the improvements we are making today.”
Mr. Dell, the company’s founder who returned as chief executive two days before the quarter ended, will not have to bear direct responsibility for the lackluster performance in the fourth quarter. He has been focusing over the last month on assembling a new top management team, making outside hires and a few promotions. Eight top executives have resigned or retired as Mr. Dell made the changes.

Crisis And The Web

2008-10-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

One thing is certain: A new scandal or crisis always seems to be around the next corner. Yet today, very few brands and celebrities know how to fully leverage the Internet when faced with a public relations crisis. Recent PR nightmares for JetBlue, Turner Broadcasting, Dell Computers and KFC-Taco Bell demonstrate that as the "social Web" evolves, the focus for brands needs to be less on digital marketing and more on digital brand management.During the first few days of JetBlue's crisis, as the ice iced and de-iced on New York's runways, the airline's corporate communications department seemingly sat idle. But their customers did not. Dpstyles was sending photos from his phone to Flickr.com, DadLabs was uploading video to YouTube, Matt Linderman was posting "lessons from a JetBlue meltdown" on 37 Signals, and Genevieve McCaw bought herself the domain name JetBlueHostage.com. Blogging on why a free return ticket wasn't adequate compensation for being stuck on a tarmac for 11 hours on Valentine's Day, McCaw, within four days of setting up her blog, was featured on CNN, had 75 pages of printed e-mails from fellow JetBlue customers and was finalizing a date to meet face-to-face with JetBlue CEO David Neeleman.In time, Neeleman, confronting his first true test of consumer confidence, demonstrated that he, too, has a keen understanding of the social dynamics of the Web. After his admittedly slow initial response, rather than attempting to control the message Neeleman entered the conversation. He did it with a sincerity and humility that you don't often see coming from a corporate CEO. In getting the tonality right, JetBlue's message fit the medium. People began talking with them rather than at them. And in doing so, JetBlue was able to ultimately change the course of the dialog. JetBlue leveraged new Web 2.0 tools like YouTube in a manner that was unprecedented. In contrast to how Turner Broadcasting reacted to the Boston bomb scare and Yum Brands responded to rats in a New York Taco Bell, JetBlue made the Internet a cornerstone of its crisis management strategy.The Internet accelerates and amplifies public opinion like nothing that has come before it. And because of this, the voice of the angry consumer has never been louder. Until recently, consumer complaints were limited to message boards and chat rooms. But as JetBlue realized, at times of crisis, while corporate communication experts are preparing manicured statements, customers are now blogging, e-mailing and posting photos out of rage and desperation because the very people who should be listening to them aren't. Brands that get it right will be the ones that use the same online tools as their customers. But if what happened to JetBlue happened to your brand, how prepared would you be to enter "the discussion?" Are you currently an active participant in the community that you will need to speak to? Today, while customers can act swiftly in the digital space—using fast publishing tools like blogs and wikis to amplify their arguments—most brands don't have the ability to move as quickly. These companies don't have the procedures in place that allow them to respond. Brands need to not only have access to the tools, but need to understand Web culture well enough to use the tools as effectively as their customers.But just as ad agencies have been slow to adapt to the digital channel, so too have most PR agencies and internal corporate communications departments. What they have yet to realize is that the first place a growing number of people go to find out about what a company is doing during a crisis is not to their televisions or newspapers. It's straight to the Internet to see not only how the company is responding, but how fast that response is coming, and what others are saying about it. What recent events demonstrate is that today any one Web site is only one node in a much larger conversation. Effective communication on the Web comes not from knowing how to launch a new campaign, but in knowing how it connects with everything else that is out there.If you are a CEO today, you should be asking yourself: Do we have a digital crisis management strategy? Who are the people from our Web team that we need to have around the table if something were to go wrong? Do we have access to fast publishing tools like blogging software and wikis? Are we prepared to respond as effectively as our customers are prepared to speak out?As more and more brands are learning, at a time of crisis the Internet will prove to be the most important communications channel you have.

Bluetooth Technology

2008-10-01T18:59:00.000-07:00

Yup, it's noise-cancelling Bluetooth headset day. At lunch today, Motorola rolled out two new noise-cancelling headsets, the flagship MOTOPURE H15 and the less-expensive H780. The new pair follow up the disastrous MOTOPURE H12, a noise-cancelling headset which in our tests did not actually cancel any noise.
The H15, at least, seems to be doing much better. Motorola dragged me around Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan to show off the noise-zapping functions, and I made several calls to both humans and robots. The H15 did a terrific job of cancelling the noise coming through my mic - the folks on the other end reported not hearing the background noise. But although they sounded clear to me, they weren't all that loud in the earpiece, and I found myself mashing the 'volume up' button futilely. For more comprehensive testing, you're going to have to wait for the review.
The H15 and H780 use a new version of CrystalTalk, Motorola's noise-cancelling algorithm. Like Plantronics' recent Voyager 835, they use two microphones to detect and cancel outside noise, and alter both the sound profile that they're transmitting out and the frequency distribution in your own earpiece accordingly. The H15 is designed to handle wind noise especially well, Moto said.
Both headsets have multipoint Bluetooth 2.1 for easy pairing to multiple phones and come with multiple earbuds to fit your ear. The smaller H15 has 4.5 hours of talk time; the larger H780 has 7 hours.
The MOTOPURE H15 will be available for $129 later this year. The H780 will be available for $99 later this year.

Apparently, it's noise-cancelling headset day today. At lunch, I'm going to some big Motorola event where they're presumably announcing a noise-cancelling Bluetooth headset, and today Plantronics spun out their Voyager 835, their first noise-cancelling headset with dual-mic technology.
Dual-mic noise cancellation uses a microphone pointed outwards to test and analyze background noise. It's a pretty common method of noise cancellation. According to Plantronics, what they bring to the table is AudioIQ, an algorithm that alters sound both in the earpiece and the transmitter, rather than just the sound the person on the other end hears.
Unlike the Aliph New Jawbone, the 835 is designed to work best in middle-of-the-road noise environments - out on the street, or in a car with the top down - and not in hyper-noisy situations, Plantronics said. They said they've tuned the headset to The Plantronics Voyager 835 gets 5 days of standby and 5 hours of talk time, and it will be available immediately.
We're pretty interested to review this headset. Plantronics makes some of the best sounding headsets on the market - their Voyager 510 and 520 are two of the best Bluetooth headsets ever, and their 925 isn't so bad, either. But they've also had some voice quality missteps, notably in their 665 mini-headset. We're hoping the Voyager 835 is worthy of the Voyager name.

The problem with Bluetooth speakers, or any portable speakers for that matter, is that generally, you trade sound quality and bass response for size. Accordingly, any set of speakers that actually fit in your pocket tend to sound a bit like a $10 AM radio. Thankfully, Motorola's ROKR EQ5 speakers break with the tired tradition, delivering surprisingly loud and crisp sound over Bluetooth, while doubling as a fairly decent speakerphone that slides easily into a pants pocket. Unfortunately, the $120 price tag means most of us will be settling for speakers that sound worse, or keeping our music and phone calls to ourselves.
That being said, you get what you pay for here, and the EQ5 speakers deserve hefty praise. If only Moto could deliver another cell phone with this kind of innovative design and performance, they might just have another RAZR-like hit on their hands.

Using a Windows handheld? You're in luck! Earlier this month, Microsoft released the software you'll need to let your device interact with various Windows Vista gadgets to receive, send or display information on a home network. Windows CE 5 is the kernel on which the Windows Mobile 6 operating system is based, of course.

U.S. economy troubles hit a worry-free zone for the rich

2008-10-01T08:40:00.000-07:00

Four years ago, when President George W. Bush was the host of a summit meeting of world leaders on this tiny, privately owned resort island, bestowing prestige and bringing increased tourism, Sea Island seemed recession-proof.
So confident in the future were the owners of the high-priced resort that they poured $350 million into renovations. They opened upscale restaurants. They built waterfront suites costing $5,000 a night. They installed a 100-seat movie theater, a spa, a wine cellar, equestrian facilities and three new pools.
Business boomed, and superlatives accumulated: Condé Nast Traveler named Sea Island among the "World's Best Places to Stay," and Golf Digest called it the best golf resort in North America.
But those days seemed ancient last month when the resort's owner, the Sea Island Co., fired about 500 employees, nearly 25 percent of the workforce, to stanch its financial losses amid the national downturns in tourism and real estate. Those who were dismissed ranged from cabana waiters to senior executives.
To many residents, the island has become a cautionary tale.

If a falling tide lowers all boats, they say, then Sea Island's woes reveal the faltering economy's toll on even the wealthiest, best-protected regions of the United States.
"Now we know how Detroit feels," said Harry Aiken Jr., a bar operator on neighboring St. Simons Island. "Everybody knew Sea Island was overextended, but we thought they could always just sell more property."
In many ways, Sea Island still seems a breezy, worry-free Old South getaway. The cost of the islands' homes averages $3.2 million, according to the Sea Island Co. Brooks Brothers could stock its catalogue with Sea Island's bronzed, shapely (and almost exclusively white) bodies. And politicians, professional athletes and CEOs still dream of retiring to Sea Island and its manicured, oak-studded mansions, called cottages.
But the island has attracted fewer business conferences than usual this year, said Brian Young, the resort's general manager, although personal travel has remained relatively steady.
And although houses are selling, including one for more than $4 million this month, C. Allen Brown, the company's vice president for real estate, said he had "never seen this many potential buyers waiting on the sidelines."
Fifty of the 600 houses on Sea Island are for sale, Brown said, compared with fewer than 35 this time last year.
In the sun-baked towns that surround Sea Island and rely on its high-spending clientele, people have noticed a slump in business and want to know what caused it: the national economy, natural cycles in the life of a resort or poor financial decisions?
The economy was only one reason for the cutbacks, said the chief executive of the Sea Island Co., Bill Jones 3rd. Seasonal employees were dismissed as summer crowds died down, and many people hired during the renovation were no longer necessary, he said. But he acknowledged the economy's significant role.
"Folks are waiting for the market to bottom out," Jones said. "They say, 'Until we find out where this economy is going, we can't move down here,' and I don't blame them."
But some residents say local miscalculations, not the national economy, caused the layoffs. (Fired employees signed agreements with Sea Island not to publicly discuss the causes or conditions of their dismissals, several former employees said.)
From 1998 to 2006, Sea Island underwent a sweeping renovation, updating three golf courses and adding a 65,000-square-foot, or about 6,040 square-meter, spa and fitness center, a 2,000-bottle wine cellar and other costly accommodations. Then the economy turned sour.
"Rich as they were, there was a real naïveté about money," Nancy Thomason, the longtime owner of a second-hand bookstore on St. Simons, said of the Sea Island Co. "They were used to being millionaires and playing that game, but they didn't have the money."
Since its development in the 1920s, Sea Island has attracted a well-heeled and powerful clientele, including six U.S. presidents. In recent years, homeowners have included the former Attorney General Griffin B. Bell, the Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz and the former CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer.

An external shock shakes up an economic model for Asia

2008-09-29T17:36:00.000-07:00

The deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression is likely to do more than years of international prodding to wean China and its Asian neighbors from their export-led model of economic growth.
Washington's $700 billion mortgage bailout plan will reshape the U.S. financial industry, perhaps for a generation or two, in ways that are not yet clear. The fallout for the rest of the world will be far-reaching.
But for Asia, one consequence of the turmoil is already inescapable. After living beyond its means for many years, America will have to rebuild its savings, so consumption will fall. Exports to the United States from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and now South Korea are already weakening.
"I think this is a wake-up call for China," said Stephen Roach, the chairman of Morgan Stanley in Asia.
Roach says that he expects U.S. consumption growth to halve - to about 2 percent - as debt burdens are pared.

As economic weakness spreads to Europe and Japan, the impact on China's exports could cut its growth rate from about 10 percent now - already down from 11.9 percent in 2007 - to about 8 percent.
"It just underscores the fact that when you have a vibrant but very large export sector, when you have an external shock and you don't have a lot of dynamism on the internal demand side, you have greater risks to growth," he said.
Central banks in the region are already responding. Taiwan, China, Australia and New Zealand have all cut interest rates.
Easing monetary policy is all well and good. Many countries can also afford to resort to fiscal stimulus.
But stoking domestic demand also requires changes that sometime shake the foundations of an economy - like scrapping deterrents to foreign investment in Japan, ending protection for favored groups in Malaysia or subjecting dominant companies to more competition in the Philippines and Hong Kong.
These are politically arduous tasks at the best of times. That's why economists wanted governments to get cracking on them while the going was good.
Countries instead largely shirked the challenge, content to rely on export-led growth by holding down their exchange rates. Quite apart from hindering the needed rebalancing of the global economy, an undervalued currency acts as a tax on domestic demand, Hong Liang and Yu Song, economists who follow China for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, said in a report.
The result is evident in the case of China, where household consumption last year came to just 35.3 percent of gross domestic product - an unprecedented low in peacetime for a major country.
This means that a lopsided economy has scant domestic demand to fall back on as the global downturn deepens. "The real costs of China's resistance to yuan appreciation are now becoming more apparent," Liang and Song wrote.
So what is to be done?
In the case of China, Beijing must provide affordable health care and education and beef up its flimsy pensions system so people need to save for a rainy day. But setting up the administrative structures to ensure extra money is well spent takes time.
"My worry is that there are a lot of things that China can do to boost domestic consumption, including on the fiscal side, but none of these things are going to happen very quickly," said Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University.
For the region more broadly, a precondition of stronger domestic demand is a more efficient financial system. For too long, Asia has in effect contracted out to Wall Street the job of managing its excess savings. If Asia's surpluses now shrink and it keeps more money at home, the region will have to deepen its bond markets at last and, ironically, promote more financial innovation so capital can be invested productively.
With complex, new-fangled debt instruments now discredited, making the case for liberalization will be tough. Regulators in Asia will now be extremely cautious about approving any new forms of securitization, said James Seward, a financial sector specialist at the World Bank.
"No one would advocate that sub-prime types of securities be introduced in the markets, but the concern is that all new or emerging products will be stopped," he wrote on a World Bank blog.

Behind crisis at AIG, a fragile web of risks

2008-09-28T20:08:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, the most powerful U.S. regulators and bankers huddled in the Lower Manhattan fortress that is the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, desperately trying to stave off disaster.
As the group, led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr., pondered the collapse of one of the oldest U.S. investment banks, Lehman Brothers, a more dangerous threat emerged: American International Group, the world's largest insurer, was teetering. AIG needed billions of dollars to right itself and was suddenly begging for help.
The only Wall Street chief executive participating in the meeting was Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Paulson's former firm. Blankfein had particular reason for concern.
Although it was not widely known, Goldman, a Wall Street stalwart that had seemed immune to its rivals' woes, was AIG's largest trading partner, according to six people close to the insurer who requested anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. A collapse of the insurer threatened to leave a hole of as much as $20 billion in Goldman's side, several of these people said.
Days later, U.S. officials, who had let Lehman die and initially balked at tossing a lifeline to AIG, ended up rescuing the insurer for $85 billion.

Their message was simple: Lehman was expendable. But if AIG unspooled, so could some of the mightiest enterprises in the world.
A Goldman spokesman said during an interview that the firm was never imperiled by AIG's troubles and that Blankfein participated in the Fed discussions to safeguard the entire financial system, not his firm's own interests.
Yet an exploration of AIG's demise and its relationships with firms like Goldman offers important insights into the mystifying - and astonishingly fragile - financial world that began to implode in recent weeks.
Although America's housing collapse is often cited as having caused the crisis, the system was vulnerable because of intricate financial contracts known as credit derivatives, which insure debt holders against default. They are fashioned privately and beyond the ken of regulators - sometimes even beyond the understanding of executives peddling them.
Originally intended to diminish risk and spread prosperity, these inventions instead magnified the impact of bad mortgages like the ones that felled Bear Stearns and Lehman and now threaten the entire global economy.
In the case of AIG, the virus exploded from a freewheeling little 377-person unit in London, and flourished in a climate of opulent pay, lax oversight and blind faith in financial risk models. It nearly decimated one of the world's most admired companies, a seemingly sturdy insurer with a trillion-dollar balance sheet, 116,000 employees and operations in 130 countries.
"It is beyond shocking that this small operation could blow up the holding company," said Robert Arvanitis, chief executive of Risk Finance Advisors in Westport, Connecticut. "They found a quick way to make a fast buck on derivatives, based on AIG's solid credit rating and strong balance sheet. But it all got out of control."
The insurance giant's London unit was known as AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. It was run with almost complete autonomy, and with an iron hand, by Joseph Cassano, according to current and former AIG employees.
A one-time executive with Drexel Burnham Lambert - the investment bank made famous in the 1980s by the junk bond king Michael Milken, who later pleaded guilty to six felony charges - Cassano helped start the London unit in 1987.
The unit became profitable enough that analysts considered Cassano a dark horse candidate to succeed Maurice Greenberg, the longtime chief executive who shaped AIG in his own image until he was ousted amid an accounting scandal three years ago.
But last February, Cassano resigned after the London unit began bleeding money and auditors raised questions about how the unit valued its holdings. By Sept. 15, the unit's troubles forced a major downgrade in AIG's debt rating, requiring the company to post roughly $15 billion in additional collateral - which then prompted the U.S. rescue.
Cassano did not respond to interview requests left at his home and with his lawyer. An AIG spokesman also declined to comment.
At AIG, he found himself ensconced in a behemoth that had a long and storied history of deftly juggling risks. It insured people and properties against natural disasters and death, offered sophisticated asset management services and did so reliably and with bravado on many continents. Even now, its insurance subsidiaries are financially strong.
When Cassano first waded into the derivatives market, his biggest business was selling so-called plain vanilla products like interest rate swaps. Such swaps allow participants to bet on the direction of interest rates and, in theory, insulate themselves from unforeseen financial events.
Ten years ago, a "watershed" moment changed the profile of the derivatives that Cassano traded, according to a transcript of comments he made at an industry event last year. Derivatives specialists from JPMorgan Chase, a leading bank that had many dealings with Cassano's unit, came calling with a novel idea.

JPMorgan proposed the following: AIG should try writing insurance on packages of debt known as "collateralized debt obligations." CDOs were pools of loans sliced into pieces and sold to investors based on the credit quality of the underlying securities.
The proposal meant that the London unit was essentially agreeing to provide insurance to financial institutions holding CDOs and other debts in case they defaulted - in much the same way some homeowners are required to buy mortgage insurance to protect lenders in case the borrowers cannot pay back their loans.

Dell Computer Taking Aim at Consumers

2008-09-27T18:54:00.000-07:00

The Dell Computer Corporation, the world's largest mail-order seller of personal computers, has ambitious plans to expand beyond its corporate clientele and sell more to consumers.
Today, the company plans to announce the formation of a new division aimed at consumers; it is to be headed by David Hood, who joined Dell two weeks ago from the AT&T Corporation, where he was general manager of the company's Worldnet Internet access service.
Mr. Hood's new organization will receive a marketing budget three times as large as Dell's previous spending on consumer sales, said Paul Bell, head of Dell's small-business and consumer unit and Mr. Hood's superior. He declined to specify the precise size of the budget, which will be spent largely on television, newspaper and magazine advertising, though he said it was in the ''tens of millions of dollars.''
With a 67 percent increase in revenue last quarter, Dell is by far the fastest growing of the top-tier personal computer makers, and its stock has been a darling of Wall Street. By selling directly to its customers over the telephone and the Internet, Dell has been able to offer more powerful machines at lower prices than competing companies such as the Compaq Computer Corporation, I.B.M. and the Hewlett-Packard Company, which sell through dealers. But unlike Gateway 2000 Inc., the next-largest mail-order computer maker, which focuses more on consumers, Dell sells mostly to businesses.
After a failed attempt to reach consumers through retailers like Wal-Mart in the early 1990's, Michael S. Dell, the company's 32-year-old chairman and chief executive, has largely spurned consumer sales, arguing that first-time buyers require too much expensive hand-holding.
But the company has welcomed individuals whom it calls ''knowledgeable buyers'' who are looking for the latest technology and are comfortable buying a PC sight unseen. Mr. Bell said that such buyers amounted to about 10 percent of Dell's $9.8 billion in sales over the last four quarters and that sales to them grew 90 percent in the quarter that ended on Aug. 3, compared with a year earlier.
''In the last few months, Dell has begun to appreciate the opportunities in the consumer space,'' Louis Mazzucchelli, an analyst at Gerard Klauer Mattison & Company in New York, said. ''I think they look at Gateway's success there and Compaq's success there and they think they can get a bigger share of that market if they go after it a little more directly.''
Mr. Bell said that Dell would not abandon its focus on sophisticated buyers but would try to reach more of them by advertising in general-interest and consumer-oriented computer publications, where the Dell brand has only recently begun to appear. In addition, Dell plans to use a new financing joint venture to offer consumers who lease computers for two years the opportunity to trade up to the latest machine for the same monthly payment.
''By not focusing on consumers, we haven't kept up with the market and there is no reason why we can't get as much share in the consumer market as we get in the rest of the market,'' Mr. Bell said.

Dell and other direct-sales companies offer what Dell calls "mass customization," which means letting the buyer mix-and-match components, like the central processor, the size of the storage disk, the amount of working memory and the software installed. Experienced computer users usually have detailed preferences. Sales to Resellers
The company will continue to sell personal computers to "value added resellers," or companies that install additional hardware into the computers, or link them together into networks with special software, and then resell them as packages to client companies. Mr. Dell said yesterday that such sales accounted for less than 10 percent of his volume.

Computer companies have had varied experiences with direct sales. Apple gave them up last year, Mr. Zwetchkenbaum said. I.B.M., on the other hand, is now emphasizing direct sales.

A letter to Democratic leaders in Congress this week from Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, urged them to pass the waiver and retain access to the station. “Unless we act immediately,” he wrote, “the U.S. will abandon its role in supporting, and benefiting from, missions to this amazing facility.”
That letter removed the legislative roadblock, said Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a Democrat. “I think Obama changed the game,” he said, because it focused the attention of Congressional leadership on the urgency of the issue. “Everybody knew it was the right thing to do,” Mr. Nelson said. “That doesn’t mean everybody likes it, but they knew it was the right thing to do.”

The Next Leap for Linux

2008-09-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

LINUX runs the Google servers that manage billions of searches each day. It also runs the TiVo digital video recorder, the Motorola Razr cellphone and countless other electronic devices.

But why would anyone want to use Linux, an open-source operating system, to run a PC? “For a lot of people,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, “Linux is a political idea — an idea of freedom. They don’t want to be tied to Microsoft or Apple. They want choice. To them it’s a greater cause.”
That’s not the most compelling reason for consumers. There is the price: Linux is free, or nearly so.
Unlike Windows from Microsoft and OS X from Apple, Linux is not owned, updated or controlled by a single company. Thousands of developers around the world work on Linux, making improvements and issuing new versions several times a year. Because the core Linux software is open source, these developers have the right — some would say responsibility — to borrow from one another’s work, constantly looking for enhancements.
But Linux has always had a reputation of being difficult to install and daunting to use. Most of the popular Windows and Macintosh programs cannot be used on it, and hand-holding — not that you get that much of it with Windows — is rare. But those reasons for rejecting Linux are disappearing.
Until recently, major PC makers shied away from Linux. Now the industry is watching as Dell is selling two Linux-equipped desktop models ($549 and $870, including a monitor) and a $774 notebook PC. (Hewlett-Packard offers Linux systems to businesses, and Lenovo, the Chinese company that bought I.B.M.’s PC division, sells Linux machines in China and says it will soon offer Linux-based computers in the United States.)
The Ubuntu version of Linux runs the Dell computers. Because Dell does not have to pay a licensing fee for the operating system, the computers are $80 cheaper than PCs with Windows Vista Home Premium or $50 cheaper than the stripped-down Vista Basic edition.
Ubuntu is generally regarded as one of the more consumer-friendly versions of Linux, so the Linux PC experience is similar to what you would get with a Windows-equipped Dell. When you start the machine, the screen looks familiar; preinstalled applications can easily be found and run from an Applications menu at the top left of the screen. A “Places” menu lets you search for files, and a System menu is there for setting preferences and finding help.
And there is a lot more than just an operating system. Ubuntu, like some other Linux distributions, comes with a lot of free software, including OpenOffice, an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite with a full-featured word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation program. It also comes with the popular Firefox Web browser as well as an e-mail program, an instant messaging program, a graphic image editor, music player and a photo manager.
Thanks to open source developers, there are thousands more free programs. An Add/Remove function actually makes finding programs easier with Linux than it is for Mac and Windows. Without having to go to Web sites, it lets you browse through categories of software. It took me only seconds to find several additional music players, a PDF reader and other programs. In addition to downloading the software, this feature installs it and finds any necessary additional files.
You do not have to buy a new Dell PC to try Linux. You can order a free CD or download a copy of Ubuntu at ubuntu.com. The Ubuntu CD can be used to install Linux on a PC’s hard drive, or you can boot from the CD to test-drive the operating system on a Windows machine or an Intel-based Mac, without having to install or delete anything. Running Ubuntu from a CD is considerably slower than from a machine’s hard drive but all the functions are there, so it’s a good way to get a feel for how it works.
One challenge for Linux users is finding media players that work with encrypted music and DVDs. Ubuntu comes with a movie player, but it is not automatically configured to play copy-protected commercial DVDs. To watch a movie, the Linux user must install necessary codecs, or decoders. One way to do that is to first download a program called Automatix from www.getautomatix.com.
When you run that program you get an ominous warning that downloading and installing “non-free codecs without paying a fee to the concerned authorities constitutes a CRIME in the United States of America

Arts(newdellcomputers)

2008-09-25T17:23:00.000-07:00

San Diego-based A Reason To Survive, or ARTS, announced today it has opened the Pat D'Arrigo ARTS Center, a 7000-square foot space located at the NTC Promenade in Pt. Loma. The Center will offer free in-house programs, classes, camps, workshops, exhibits, and performances for San Diego children who are facing adversity.The Center is named after the late mother of executive director and founder Matt D'Arrigo and is designed to be a safe environment for children to come after school, on the weekends, and during the summer to learn about the arts. The goal of D'Arrigo is to help the children express themselves in positive, creative ways, thereby helping them to cope with their challenges."Opening the ARTS Center is a major milestone for us," said D'Arrigo. "Not only am I seeing a personal dream fulfilled, but I am able to offer a unique and extraordinary resource to more of San Diego's children," he said.At the new Center, regional artists musicians, poets, writers, dancers, and actors will offer a broad palette of classes. The Center has a fully equipped music room, a media arts room with 20 computers, a ceramic and sculpture studio, a performance space for dance, drama and music, and a multipurpose space for drawing painting, printmaking, and mixed media.The Center will also host the Children's Gallery, a 625-square-foot space dedicated to exhibiting and selling original artwork and merchandise created by the children. Staffed by youth, a percentage of the gallery sales will go to the children and a percentage will go to support the ARTS programs.ARTS offers a therapeutic medium to children and families experiencing adversity and partners to provide arts programs to such organizations as Ronald McDonald House Charities, San Diego Center for Children, Children's Hospital, San Diego Hospice, Camp Pendleton, as well as the greater community. Through imaginative expression, ARTS strives to improve the well-being and quality of life, fostering healing and hope. Those who would like to donate to ARTS can visit www.artsurvive.org or call 619.297.ARTS (2787).

ARTS, a not for profit organization, is dedicated to healing, inspiring and empowering children facing life challenges by providing innovative arts-based programs, education and opportunities.ARTS provides arts programs to such organizations as Ronald McDonald House Charities, San Diego Center for Children, Children?s Hospital, San Diego Hospice, Camp Pendleton, and others. Through imaginative expression, ARTS strives to improve the well-being and quality of life, fostering healing and hope.

The ARTS Center will allow ARTS to expand its programming by offering in-house programs, camps, and workshops to a wider population of children in San Diego, while continuing to offer outreach programs at partner sites. In addition to art classes, ARTS will also run specialty workshops using the arts to help children cope with issues such as grief and loss, divorce, abuse and neglect, physical and mental challenges, self-image and self-esteem issues. The ARTS Center is a crucial resource in San Diego, providing comprehensive, quality arts programming for children facing adversity.D'Arrigo commented, "We're already looking forward to moving into our beautiful new facility next summer. The ARTS Center at NTC Promenade will be a safe and nurturing environment for children to learn about the arts while expressing themselves in positive ways in order to help them cope with their challenges."

ARTS Founder and Executive Director Matt D'Arrigo commented, "The children greatly enjoyed the opportunity to express themselves in such a creative way, and we're pleased their work will be visible to the hundreds of people who pass through Sempra's lobby each day."But while the children experienced the therapeutic power of art, Sempra's employees were touched as well. "Seeing the proud and contented smiles on the artists' faces is as satisfying for us as being able to enjoy this artwork in the months and years to come," agreed Molly Cartmill, Sempra Energy's director of corporate community relations.Founded in 2001, ARTS offers a broad range of free therapeutic experiences in the visual, performing and literacy arts to San Diego area children and their families facing adversity. The program partners with organizations such as Ronald McDonald House Charities, San Diego Center for Children, Children's Hospital, San Diego Hospice, Camp Pendleton, Becky's House and others. Using the arts as a vehicle, trained and dedicated volunteers provide a supportive atmosphere fostering healing and hope. Through imaginative expression, ARTS strives to improve the well-being and quality of life for these children and their families. The majority of the 4,500 children served by ARTS each year are from low-income, minority families facing increased increased health and social disparities.

Sell Dell's Computers for Use in Clusters

2008-09-24T17:10:00.000-07:00

Cray Inc., the maker of some of the world's fastest supercomputers, plans to announce a deal today to resell smaller computers by Dell that can be linked into clusters of processors that solve complex problems.
With the three-year agreement, Dell, the leading maker of PC's and second only to Compaq in sales of data-serving computers known as servers, hopes to build more of a presence in high-performance computing through Cray's relationships with scientists in government and industry.
For Cray, which earned its legacy by building huge supercomputers that performed trillions of calculations a second, the deal is an attempt to fend off a strong threat from so-called clusters: tens or hundreds of less-expensive computers, connected by high-speed networks, that each tackle a small piece of the problems once handled by one extremely powerful machine.
''Part of it is protection for Cray, saying, 'If this is the way the market is going, we have to figure out a way to play here,' '' said Michael R. Swenson, a research analyst with the International Data Corporation.
The deal is also the latest move in an effort by Cray's new chief executive, Michael P. Haydock, to follow the industrywide trend of selling not just hardware but also services: a mix of technical support, software and consulting.
As part of the agreement, Cray will sell Dell's PowerEdge line of data-serving computers in a cabinet that bears both companies' logos.
Before Mr. Haydock was hired from I.B.M.'s global services division in October, Cray had begun building its own line of computers to approach the low end of the supercomputing market. But Mr. Haydock said he decided to abandon the project because Cray, which specializes in enormous hand-built machines, could not produce the smaller computers cheaply enough. He turned to Dell, the leading built-to-order computer manufacturer.
''I would prefer that they do what they do world class, and we do what we do world class,'' he said.
Setting up and maintaining the clusters will fall to the dozens of top-notch scientists who have joined Cray through the merging of several companies founded by the supercomputing pioneer Seymour R. Cray.
''They understand what our clients are doing, and they know how to optimize the code to make it scream,'' Mr. Haydock said, referring to configuring computers so they run computations more quickly.
After taking an order for the cluster of Dell computers, Cray will assemble them at its own offices, then install and test software for the customer's specific use before shipping.
The falling price of microprocessors and memory chips, combined with their enormous increases in speed, have led to a surge of interest in the use of high-performance computing clusters to solve problems in fields like biotechnology and aerospace engineering.

Data-serving computers, which run corporate networks and data centers, can be bought and linked in parallel for far less money than the cost of a traditional ''vector'' supercomputer. But the use of these parallel supercomputers is limited to a certain class of problems in which each processor in the network handles its own small piece of the puzzle simultaneously.
Some scientific and engineering applications are still dominated by vector computing, in which a small number of high-performance processors are augmented by special hardware to compute long chains of calculations quickly.
Businesses often use both parallel and vector computers, depending on the problem. For example, Cray said it had many customers in the auto industry who use traditional vector supercomputers to simulate noise vibrations in car designs. But the company has lost ground to parallel clusters, built by competitors like I.B.M. and Compaq, that run simulations of car crashes.
Cray, based in Seattle, is expected by the end of the year to begin selling its newest supercomputer. Its stock closed at $2.39 Friday.
John B. Jones, an analyst with Salomon Smith Barney, said Mr. Haydock recognized that healthy businesses today need more than hardware, and praised the strategy of trying to use the talents of Cray's ''Ph.D.'s and smart guys'' to add to the company's sales.

''It will, over time, if he does the right job, take the company out of the boom-bust environment it's been living in and into a more consistent revenue-and-earnings business,'' Mr. Jones said.

The unified communications initiative is still a small part of Cisco’s $40 billion annual revenue. Cisco hopes it becomes significant in its own right, but more important, executives hope to drive more network usage and related sales of the company’s Internet hardware and software.
The flashiest part of Cisco’s effort is TelePresence, an elaborate videoconferencing setup that includes video cameras, huge displays and even the surrounding desk and leather chairs. For about $299,000 a room, a company can smoothly conduct a virtual meeting across the world.
Cisco will now extend that technology through a program it calls Expert on Demand. Customers or employees will walk up to a videoconferencing terminal, press a button and be routed to the person they desire.

Cisco will now extend that technology through a program it calls Expert on Demand. Customers or employees will walk up to a videoconferencing terminal, press a button and be routed to the person they desire

Google Introduces a Phone With PC Features

2008-09-23T19:41:00.000-07:00

In the latest of a string of challenges to Apple’s popular iPhone, Google and T-Mobile on Tuesday introduced the first mobile phone powered by Google’s Android software, which they hope will bring PC-like features to millions of cellphone users.

The $179 T-Mobile G1, as the device is known, has a large color touch screen that slides out to expose a full keyboard, as well as a 3-megapixel camera. The phone’s software provides an Internet browser and easy access to many of Google’s services, including search, Gmail and YouTube. Although several applications come preloaded on the phone, the G1 is also designed to encourage third-party developers to create programs to run on it.
The G1, which is manufactured by HTC of Taiwan, will be available in the United States on Oct. 22 and in Britain in early November, the companies said. It will be available in other T-Mobile markets in Europe early next year.
“This is as good a computer as you had a few years ago,” said Google’s co-founder Larry Page, who along with the company’s other co-founder, Sergey Brin, arrived on roller blades at the New York stage where the companies held a news conference.
Google has invested tens of millions of dollars in developing the Android operating software and is giving it away for free to cellphone makers and carriers. The company hopes that many companies will build phones based on Android.
Android is one of several efforts by Google to extend its dominance from the PC-Web to the mobile Web. The software is its effort to ensure that its consumer services — as well as its advertising systems — are widely available on mobile phones..
T-Mobile, the No. 4 wireless carrier in the United States, is hoping that the G1 will help it compete more effectively against larger carriers like AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint. The company said that the G1 was primarily aimed at the consumer market, but expected that business users would also find the device compelling.
“I think frankly this device will have mass appeal,” said Cole Brodman, chief technology and innovation officer of T-Mobile USA.
The G1, which will run on both high-speed 3G networks and older cellular networks, also has Wi-Fi access, GPS navigation and Bluetooth connections. T-Mobile said the batteries will support five hours of talk time and 130 hours of standby time.
Much like Apple has done with the iPhone, Google and T-Mobile plan to offer a store where users can download applications, which they are calling the Android market. Access to Amazon.com’s MP3 store will be preloaded on the device.

The $179 price in the United States requires a two-year voice and data plan and is $20 cheaper than the iPhone. Data plans ranged from $25 to $35 a month, T-Mobile said. Pricing for Europe was not immediately known. The new phone searches the Internet more quickly and comes with a host of new applications. But the biggest change was a sharp reduction in price. Mr. Jobs said the new iPhone 3G, to be available in the United States through AT&T beginning on July 11, will sell for $199 for the 8-gigabyte model and $299 for a 16-gigabyte model. He said the biggest barrier to people buying the phone had been is $399 pricetag.

Studley Donates 25 New Dell Computers To San Diego Non-profit A Reason To Survive

2008-09-22T17:23:00.000-07:00

Computers to be used in the new Pat D'Arrigo ARTS Center
San Diego, Calif., (August 7, 2006) - At the firm's annual company outing held this year at La Costa Resort & Spa, New York-based national commercial real estate services firm Studley announced its donation of 25 new Dell computers to San Diego-based nonprofit, A Reason To Survive (ARTS).ARTS is a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing hope, healing and self confidence to lives of children and youth facing adversities by providing expressive opportunities through the visual and performing arts.The computers will be used for administrative purposes and in the media-arts lab in the Pat D'Arrigo ARTS Center, the organization's new facility located at NTC Promenade scheduled for completion this fall."We bought these computers to use at our annual company meeting," explained Michael Colacino, Studley president, "and were hoping to identify an organization in San Diego that could truly benefit from receiving them as a donation.""ARTS was a true find," he continued. "Not only is the group building a new facility where it can utilize the computers, but its mission of using the arts for outreach is well aligned with Studley?s commitment to both the arts and to giving back to the communities in which we work."Nationally, Studley volunteers with national and local organizations such as American Cancer Society, New York Cares, L.A. Regional Food Bank, Five Acres Center and The Apostle House, to name a few. Studley also reaches out to the community by sharing its art collection, featuring world-renowned artists such as Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams, and local artists like Southern California's Madoka Takagi and Tony DeLap, through exhibitions and book publications."Studley strives to support organizations that we can significantly impact," added Colacino. "Having recently opened a San Diego office, we wanted to continue that mission here with our donation to A Reason To Survive.""ARTS is truly appreciative of Studley?s generous contribution," shared Matt D'Arrigo, executive director and founder of ARTS. "These computers will help us better serve the thousands of families who need our programs to cope with life?s challenges."About ARTSFounded in 2001 by Matt D'Arrgio, A Reason To Survive (ARTS) is a nonprofit organization that offers a variety of healing experiences in the visual, performing and literary arts to children and their families facing adversity. In November 2006, the organization will open its first facility, the Pat D'Arrigo ARTS Center, named for Matt's mother who lost her battle to cancer at the age of 48, where it will begin to offer programs, camps, workshops and trainings. More information about the organization and the new center is available at www.artsurvive.org.About Studley Studley is the leading commercial real estate services firm specializing in tenant representation. Founded in 1954, Studley pioneered the "conflict-free" business model of representing only tenants in their commercial real estate transactions. Today, with 19 offices nationwide and an international presence through its London office and affiliation with Global Property Alliance, Studley provides strategic real estate solutions to top-tier corporations, not-for-profit organizations and law firms. Information about Studley is available at www.studley.com.

The ARTS Gallery, located in the Pat D'Arrigo ARTS Center, is dedicated to exhibiting and selling original artwork and merchandise. Art displayed in our gallery is created by the children who participate in ARTS programs and artists who volunteer at ARTS. Visit the ARTS Gallery to see what’s new and exciting in the world of ARTS.
ARTS provides visual, performing and literary art projects for kids facing life challenges at community partner sites and at the Pat D'Arrigo ARTS Center

Through community partners, ARTS brings visual, performing and literary art projects to kids facing life challenges

ARTS helps youths with employment and internship opportunities in arts-related fields at the ARTS Center

was officially proclaimed "A Reason To Survive Day" in the City of San Diego. At the City Council meeting held on that day, a Resolution of the City Council was presented to Executive Director Matt D'Arrigo by Mayor Jerry Sanders, Council President Scott Peters, and Councilmember Kevin Faulconer. ARTS is extremely proud to receive such an esteemed recognition of our dedication to bringing hope, healing, and self-empowerment to children facing life challenges in the City of San Diego. This day was not only a true testament to the important role that ARTS has in the community, but also to the essential role that art itself plays in the learning and development of children of all ages. ARTS hopes to continue helping more and more kids discover themselves through the visual, musical, performance, and literary arts.

Shares Slip as Dell Sees Cutbacks in Its Sector

2008-09-21T18:00:00.000-07:00

For the second time in as many months, Dell rattled its investors by warning that its customers are reluctant about spending on computers and servers

On Tuesday, the computer maker cautioned that slumping demand for technology equipment across the globe was affecting its business. The somber message, issued halfway through Dell’s third quarter, caused a drop of more than 11 percent in the price of the company’s stock. Dell closed Tuesday at $15.98, down $2.01.
Dell has frequently cited lackluster demand for technology for less than stellar financial results. In August, Dell warned that weakness in spending in the United States had carried over to Europe and Asia. It said that decline in spending contributed to a 17 percent drop in quarterly profit. The company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in early September that it planned to shrink its worldwide network of factories.
“We saw a very weak August,” Dell’s chief financial officer, Brian T. Gladden, said Tuesday at a Bank of America investors conference in San Francisco.
Only about 20 percent of Dell’s revenue comes from consumers. Its reliance on business spending, and on the government, military and education sectors, is causing Dell to feel the impact of the slowing economy ahead of some major rivals.
Small and medium-size businesses and the federal government are reining in technology purchases. “Corporate spending has been relatively balanced for us in the U.S. and the consumer market continues to be pretty strong,” Mr. Gladden said.
Some analysts have questioned whether Dell’s problems are of its own making. In August, the company blamed “self-inflicted” factors, like price cutting, for part of its woes. Mr. Gladden deflected these critiques Tuesday and emphasized that there was “more broad-based slowing” in the economy.
Dell warned of particular weakness in Britain and southern Europe. It also cited difficulty selling in China. “We saw weakness in China as part of the Olympic period and expected it to snap back,” Mr. Gladden said. “We have dug a bit of a hole there.”
Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M. have proved more resilient than some of their competitors in recent months, and in recent statements they remain optimistic. Both companies have a broad range of products sold globally. Hewlett-Packard’s customers are balanced between consumer and business customers. But a number of analysts expect the two companies to face increasing pressure because of the recent strengthening of the dollar.
H.P.’s chief financial officer, Cathie Lesjak, said at the Bank of America event that the technology company is “very confident” in the recent guidance it gave its investors.
With uncertainty rife in the financial markets and more financial services companies facing difficulties, Forrester Research scrambled this week to revise its forecast for technology spending in the United States. Forrester is now forecasting that year-over-year growth in sales of computers, software and outsourcing services will slow significantly, while spending growth for communications equipment and technology services should actually increase at a faster rate in 2008.
The research firm said it expects that softness in technology purchases will begin in the latter part of 2008 and early 2009 as companies pull back on capital spending. It is now predicting an increase in tech spending in 2009 of 6.1 percent, down from its previous forecast of 9.4 percent.
Softness in the financial sector is of particular concern to the large hardware makers, as Wall Street firms tend to spend heavily on technology.

Chiat/Day, San Francisco, which was Apple Computer's agency from 1979 until it lost the account in 1986, has found a new outlet for its computer expertise, the Dell Computer Corporation of Austin, Tex., a maker and direct marketer of high-performance personal computers.
Chiat/Day said the billings would be $10 million to $15 million. When Hal Riney & Company, San Francisco, resigned the business last month, Advertising Age said the budget was $7 million.

Chiat/Day said the billings would be $10 million to $15 million. When Hal Riney & Company, San Francisco, resigned the business last month, Advertising Age said the budget was $7 million.
The client company started in 1984 and last year had sales of $159 million. It did not conduct a review of agencies before deciding on its new one.

Responding to price cuts by larger competitors, the Dell Computer Corporation said today that it would lower prices by a range of $100 to $900 on nine of its desktop and laptop personal computers.
Dell's move came four weeks after the Compaq Computer Corporation slashed prices across the board by up to 34 percent to be more competitive with clone makers like Dell. The International Business Machines Corporation followed, cutting prices on some models on April 23.

"Clearly they're responding to Compaq's aggressive price moves," said Seymour Merrin, a personal computer retail consultant based in Palo Alto, Calif. "The question is what will work; their list price is what most people buy at, whereas almost no one pays Compaq's list," he said. Compaq is typically discounted below its suggested retail price, but Dell, as a mail-order supplier, sells at its quoted price, except to a few large customers.

As Text Messages Fly, Danger Lurks

2008-09-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

Senator Barack Obama used one to announce to the world his choice of a running mate. Thousands of Americans have used them to vote for their favorite “American Idol” contestants. Many teenagers prefer them to actually talking. Almost overnight, text messages have become the preferred form of communication for millions.

But even as industry calculations show that Americans are now using mobile phones to send or receive more text messages than phone calls, those messages are coming under increasing fire because of the danger they can pose by distracting users. Though there are no official casualty statistics, there is much anecdotal evidence that the number of fatal accidents stemming from texting while driving, crossing the street or engaging in other activities is on the rise.
“The act of texting automatically removes 10 I.Q. points,” said Paul Saffo, a technology trend forecaster in Silicon Valley. “The truth of the matter is there are hobbies that are incompatible. You don’t want to do mushroom-hunting and bird-watching at the same time, and it is the same with texting and other activities. We have all seen people walk into parking meters or walk into traffic and seem startled by oncoming cars.”
In the latest backlash against text-messaging, the California Public Utilities Commission announced an emergency measure on Thursday temporarily banning the use of all mobile devices by anyone at the controls of a moving train.
The ban was adopted after federal investigators announced that they were looking at the role that a train engineer’s text-messaging might have played here last week in the country’s most deadly commuter rail accident in four decades.
A California lawmaker is also seeking to ban text-messaging by drivers, a step already taken by a handful of other states. “We have had far too many tragic incidents around the country that are painful proof that this is a terrible problem,” said the legislator, State Senator Joe Simitian, who wrote the California law requiring drivers who are talking on a cellphone to use hands-free devices.
The fight against text messages is also reaching beyond the realm of public safety. The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s board recently upheld a 2007 ban on all text-messaging by coaches to student recruits.
“The student athlete advisory committee believed that it was unprofessional, intrusive and expensive,” said Erik Christianson, a spokesman for the N.C.A.A.
Theaters, too, long accustomed to chiding cellphone users as well as people who crumple their cough drop wrappers, have taken on texting. And, assisted by cellphone service providers, parents have moved to limit the hours in which their children can get and send text messages.
Text-messaging, also known as S.M.S. messaging (the abbreviation stands for short message service), first took off in Japan, cellphone technology experts say, in part because the cost of texting there was less than that of making cellphone calls.
In the United States, the practice has accelerated greatly in the last few years, as the technology has improved with the introduction of products like the Apple iPhone. In June, 75 billion text messages were sent in the United States, compared with 7.2 billion in June 2005, according to CTIA — the Wireless Association, the leading industry trade group.
The consumer research company Nielsen Mobile, which tracked 50,000 individual customer accounts in the second quarter of this year, found that Americans each sent or received 357 text messages a month then, compared with 204 phone calls. That was the second consecutive quarter in which mobile texting significantly surpassed the number of voice calls.
The lure of texting is self-evident. It is fast and direct, screening out the pleasantries that even standard e-mail messages call for, like “how are you.” It is used to blast information among co-workers and inform parents of their children’s whereabouts, and, as Kwame M. Kilpatrick demonstrated en route to his downfall as mayor of Detroit, is useful in expressing feelings of romantic desire. (Object lesson No. 2: text messages are also subject to subpoena.)
“It is just a super useful tool,” said Caitlin Williams, a San Francisco bakery owner whose outgoing cellphone message encourages people to send her a text.
“You can kind of cut to the chase,” Ms. Williams said. “Sometimes you just want your questions answered without having to answer a lot of questions about how your day is.”
For all her love of texting, Ms. Williams says she has seen the underbelly as well.
“Of course there is the dangerous driving while texting,” she said, “and the obnoxious person in front of you texting instead of ordering their coffee, which happened to me yesterday. We are not at a point where there are a whole lot of rules for proper etiquette for texting. I think as it becomes a more acceptable form of communication, people will regulate themselves a little more.”

Vintage Lenses on Digital Cameras

2008-09-19T18:26:00.000-07:00

ALL Shawn McCully wanted was a lens for his digital single-lens reflex camera. Little did he know, he was searching for the holy grail of amateur photography — and hoping to do it on the cheap.

“I just wanted to be able to shoot family and friends indoors without a flash,” he said. He also wanted his digital Canon 40D to take photos with a buttery smooth background and only the tiniest area in focus.
Canon sells a lens that would have been perfect for Mr. McCully if not for its $1,500 price tag. So Mr. McCully, a 32-year-old lawyer from Bellevue, Wash., turned to his closet where, like so many recent converts to digital photography, he had a stash of manual-focus lenses from his days shooting with film.
One lens in particular, a Canon FL 55-millimeter f1.2, bought around four decades ago by Mr. McCully’s father, was nearly identical to the contemporary offering from Canon. But it would not fit Mr. McCully’s digital Canon. “I realized I could probably figure out how to make this thing work,” he said.
With little more than a cheap metal ring found on eBay, a Dremel tool and a sander, Mr. McCully was able to convert the old lens so it would mount on his new digital camera. And he thus disproved an axiom of photography that had seemed as immutable as the laws of physics: when buying a lens for a D.S.L.R. camera, “low cost” and “ultra-wide aperture” are mutually exclusive terms. (A lens with a wide aperture, or a large optical opening, makes it possible to shoot in dim light and to produce very blurry backgrounds.)
For the vast majority of D.S.L.R. users, the switch that turns off the camera’s autofocus system is nothing more than a curiosity, some kind of vestigial remnant from a mechanical evolution. But a renewed interest in the deliberate twisting of a lens to focus has generated a healthy market for decades’ worth of optics that have been gathering dust in closets and taking up space as dead inventory on camera store shelves.
Photographers who had been all too happy to hold down the shutter button in a practice known as “machine-gunning” or “spray and pray” are now searching online for vintage lenses with exotic names like Pentax Takumar, Voigtländer Nokton, Chinon, Kiron, Fujinon, Hexanon and Rollei.
Paul Yates, a manager of technical training at Toronto’s Q9 Networks, says he shoots almost exclusively with vintage lenses these days, though he had been firmly ensconced in the autofocus camp.
He switched to older lenses not just for the good deals or the slower shooting, but because each lens attached to his D.S.L.R. camera created a unique look, even when the lens was the same focal length. “I might buy five 50-millimeter lenses because they each produce images with a different character,” Mr. Yates, 38, said.
He also says he believes that a manually focused lens often surpasses the accuracy of the few autofocus lenses he still owns. “There is a tactile quality to holding onto a metal focus ring,” said Mr. Yates. “The damping of the ring — the resistance — allows me to fine-tune the focus so much more accurately. When I manual-focus with the newer lenses, they just don’t feel the same.”
Usually all that is needed to get many vintage lenses working on a new camera is a simple twist-on adapter, costing $10 to $30. Because each adapter is unique to a specific lens mount and camera combination and adapters are relatively inexpensive as camera gear goes, photographers usually buy a separate adapter for each lens. They can be found on eBay, though some manufacturers, like Pentax, sell their own. Many vendors sell generic adapters, but it is best to search online for reviews on the quality and compatibility of specific lens, camera and adapter combinations. Online photography communities like fredmiranda.com and ManualFocus.org are good places to start the research.
But like shooting with a manual lens, buying them can be complicated. For mechanical and optical reasons, some brands of D.S.L.R.’s work with a wider array of vintage lenses than others. Nikon D.S.L.R.’s can take scores of vintage Nikon lenses without adapters. But the Nikon cameras don’t work well, if at all, with the majority of vintage lenses from makers like Olympus, Pentax and Zeiss.
Canon cameras have the opposite characteristic. They are incompatible with most vintage Canon lenses, but with cheap adapters can mount dozens of brands of third-party vintage lenses.
Olympus D.S.L.R.’s can mount most of the same vintage lenses Canon cameras can, along with vintage Olympus lenses if you have the adapters.
Pentax D.S.L.R.’s can mount just about every Pentax lens ever made and the third-party lenses that use the Pentax-style lens-mount. Sony D.S.L.R.’s are the least compatible of the major manufacturers. Those cameras work with certain Minolta lenses and, with an adapter, lenses that use what is known as an M42 screw mount.

As Fears Grow, Wall St. Titans See Shares Fall

2008-09-18T17:09:00.000-07:00

Even Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, the two last titans left standing on Wall Street, are no longer immune.

To the surprise of executives within those firms, and their rivals, the stocks of these powerful companies were drawn into the crisis of investor confidence on Wednesday. Morgan Stanley, whose stock fell almost 25 percent, was considering a merger with Wachovia or another bank to help shore up its finances. Goldman Sachs’s stock fell almost 14 percent, and it had to rebuff rumors that it was seeking a capital infusion.
The assault on these two companies underscored how quickly a sense of fear is spreading through Wall Street. Both firms just reported respectable profits on Tuesday, and were considered in a separate class from weaker banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers that saw the value of their businesses evaporate.
“Stop the Insanity,” wrote Glenn Schorr, a brokerage analyst at UBS, in an e-mail message to clients on Wednesday.
A tie-up with a bank would restore Morgan Stanley to its structure during the Depression, when the firm split from the Morgan banking empire. It would also leave Goldman Sachs as the last major American investment bank after a global financial crisis that has gripped markets for more than a year snowballed last week, forcing the most risk-taking industry in the world to get back to basics.
Only a day earlier, Morgan Stanley defended itself from growing doubts about its future, issuing a fairly positive earnings report to ward off concerns about its health.
But as the fear that gripped markets after Lehman Brothers failed also enveloped the firm, John J. Mack, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive, spoke Tuesday evening with Citigroup’s chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit, about a possible combination, according to people briefed on the talks.
On Thursday, however, Morgan Stanley vigorously denied a report in The New York Times that Mr. Mack had said that Morgan needed to seek a merger in order to remain in business.
Mr. Mack was said to have made the comment in the conversation with Mr. Pandit. Citigroup, which had declined to comment on Wednesday night, also denied Thursday that such a comment had been made during the conversation.
Citigroup is thinking of deals it can strike with consumer banks, like buying the struggling Washington Mutual out of bankruptcy if its reported efforts to auction itself should fail, that would provide it with cheaper deposit funding.
Mr. Mack also entered into discussions on Wednesday with Wachovia and several other banks, people briefed on those discussions said. The talks with Wachovia are preliminary and a deal may not emerge. The banks declined to comment.
Goldman Sachs may be under less pressure given its recent history of outperforming its peers. The bank made $11.6 billion last year and has not posted a loss during the credit crisis. Morgan Stanley has also performed well, but has suffered more write-downs and had a loss of $3.6 billion in the fourth quarter of last year.
Still, many specialists say they believe that the monumental events of the last four days herald a new period of painful change for the American financial industry — one that speculators are rushing to pounce on. While Wall Street has gone through tough times before, only to emerge bigger and stronger, some financial specialists question whether the industry can rebound quickly after using high levels of leverage, or borrowed money, to binge on risky investments. Those investments have proved to be disastrous. Worldwide, financial companies have reported more than $500 billion in charges and losses stemming from the credit crisis — a figure some specialists say could eventually exceed $1 trillion.
Merrill Lynch rushed into the arms of Bank of America this week in a deal that in some ways harked back to the past. During the Depression, Congress separated commercial banks, which take deposits and make loans, from investment banks, which underwrite and trade securities. The investment banks were allowed to do business with less oversight, while commercial banks operated with tighter supervision.
But after Congress repealed those Depression-era laws in 1999, commercial banks began muscling in on Wall Street’s turf. As the new competition whittled down profit margins, investment banks used more of their capital to trade securities and also began developing financial derivatives to fuel profits.
Now, executives like John A. Thain, the chief executive of Merrill and a former Goldman executive, say investment banks will need large bases of deposits to shore up their capital.
Investors appeared to be questioning whether either Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs would be able to survive alone as panic spread through the markets. The cost of protecting against defaults on the debt of both have shot up, a signal that some investors believe one or both of the banks could be next in the growing list of financial companies to either go bust, get sold or require a government bailout. Any institution without a big, stable balance sheet is seen as vulnerable to the kind of rapid collapse in confidence that led to the demise of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

Russia Halts Trading on Concerns for Banks

2008-09-17T17:32:00.000-07:00

In the last several years, the Russian stock market has muscled its way onto the global financial stage in a remarkable oil-driven boom that has also enhanced Russia’s political influence. Now, at a time when the Kremlin is asserting its might abroad, all that is drawing to a close.

Russian financial regulators halted stock trading for the second time this week on Wednesday in a move that immediately stirred memories of Russia’s traumatic financial crisis in 1998. The Micex index was down 3.09 percent by 12:10 p.m. on Wednesday, when regulators halted trading. The other main index, RTS, was down 6.39 percent when trading was stopped.
Half of the value of the Russian market has evaporated since May on declining oil prices and the violence in Georgia, although much of the recent decline was hastened as the collapse of Lehman Brothers this week made already jittery investors more fearful of taking on risk.

Dedicated hedge funds from New York to London to Stockholm focused on the Russian market as oil prices rose to records, enriching a generation of investors. But its sharp fall is a reminder that it has remained, in many ways, a wobbly emerging market.

In the last three days, the main stock index slid more than 25 percent, as the collapse of Lehman and the rescue of the American International Group prompted a flight from such investments.

The finance minister, Aleksei Kudrin, on Wednesday took the extraordinary step of pledging $44 billion in federal funds for three state-controlled banks to jump-start a rebound and halt a spiral of margin-call selling. Reserve requirements for commercial banks were also reduced sharply to encourage billions of dollars to circulate more freely in the financial sector.

“Russia has the reputation of being one of the most trust-challenged places to do business in the world to start with,” said Kenneth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard. The war heightened those concerns, he said. “Rightly or wrongly, the conflict with Georgia was viewed as a retreat from connections with global markets and global standards.”
American officials seized on to the precipitous slide in Russian markets as evidence that investors had grown disenchanted with Russia after it began a military incursion into Georgia on Aug. 8.
“Capital is fleeing Russia, with $7 billion leaving on Aug. 8 alone,” William J. Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs, told a Senate hearing, according to Reuters. “Russia and the Russian people are paying a considerable price for their country’s disproportionate military action,” he said.

Russian state television showed an image that could sum up the broader disaffection with emerging markets: a once-bustling trading floor in Moscow, all but deserted Wednesday, its screens blank, while one trader sat fiddling idly with a computer mouse.

Russian regulators have so far hewed to orthodox economic stimulus policies, in spite of calls last week for the government to invest the nation’s primary sovereign wealth fund in domestic stocks to raise prices. Their response so far, which rests on conventional support for the banking system, suggests that Mr. Kudrin and other economic liberals in the Russian government have won the policy debate on how to respond to the crisis, at least for now.

But the problems in Russia run deep, and Mr. Kudrin cautioned against expecting a quick recovery. “Rebuilding will take some time,” he said.
Russian stocks have fallen faster than would be justified by dropping oil prices or in response to financial turmoil in the United States, economists say. Part of the reason is that Russia is spending more on its military. On Tuesday, Vladimir V. Putin, the former president and now the prime minister, said 2.4 trillion rubles ($94.4 billion), would go to the military in the 2009 budget.
The average price-to-earnings ratio — the most widely used method of valuing stocks, was 4 for Russian stocks Wednesday, far lower than the ratio of 10 found on average in developed markets, according to Steven Dashevsky, chief analyst of Aton, a brokerage firm in Moscow.

Surgutneftegaz, one of the largest companies in Russia, was trading Wednesday at just over the value of the cash in its bank account, meaning investors valued its vast oil fields, its thousands of employees and other assets as nearly worthless under its current Russian management.

Russia is the largest and most powerful of the states to emerge from the former Soviet Union. As the seat of the Soviet empire that existed for over 70 years, the Russians wielded tremendous power both within the U.S.S.R. and in the international sphere. Almost from their emergence as a separate people, the Russians have extended the boundaries of their country to include a wide variety of non-Russian people. Both the Russian Czars and the Bolsheviks who came to power in 1917 have a long history of expansionist policies, which explains why, even today, an important part of the Russian national identity is that of leader of a large empire.

Broad and multi-faceted coverage of Russia, updated by The Times's Moscow bureau, including a daily review of the Russian newspapers; multimedia; travel; descriptions of Russian industry, and archival articles published in The New York Times.

The plane, operated by a division of Aeroflot, was on its approach to land in Perm when it crashed into an unpopulated area of the city, officials said.

Like ‘The Real World,’ With More Computers

2008-09-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

FOR years, MTV has been bringing together eclectic groups of young adults to live together in loftlike spaces on the series “The Real World.” Now, with the backing of a major technology marketer, the network has gathered 16 youthful creative types in a loft in Brooklyn for a contest that can be watched on TV or online.

Beginning on Monday, MTV and its mtvU channel, which is aimed at college and university students, will join forces with Hewlett-Packard to present “Engine Room,” an original series that will follow the 16 contestants, divided into four teams, as they produce digital art using — of course — PCs, work stations, monitors and other products sold by H.P.
Episodes of “Engine Room” run from five to seven minutes each, and the series is scheduled to last seven weeks. At the end, one team will win prizes that include $400,000 in cash and a chance to program the giant MTV screen in Times Square for a night.
“Engine Room” follows a previous video series that H.P. sponsored with MTV, called “Meet or Delete.” It also comes after a video series for the back-to-school season, “Dorm Storm,” presented by Hewlett-Packard in partnership with Broadband Enterprises, an online video producer and distributor.
Those series are indicative of the increasing interest in video campaigns among large marketers, particularly to reach younger consumers who have demonstrated a willingness to watch clips on their computers, cellphones and other mobile devices.
“We don’t want it to be advertising; we want it to be real,” said David Roman, vice president for worldwide marketing communications at the personal systems group of H.P. in Cupertino, Calif.
“We’re learning as we go not to do so much talking about what we do but rather let people do things with the product,” Mr. Roman said. “That’s where the ‘wow factor’ comes from.”
•
Mr. Roman estimated that spending by Hewlett-Packard for the “Engine Room” initiative would be in “the tens of millions of dollars,” beginning with efforts that began months ago to recruit contestants on a Web site (mtvengineroom.com).
Almost 2,000 people from 122 countries submitted more than 20,000 original artworks, he said, to earn a chance to take part in the contest.
The teams of contestants are divided by the regions they come from: Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America. They are visited during the competition by guests like the musician Moby; Kevin Smith, the movie director; and the British pop band the Ting Tings.
The digital creations of the teams were judged by a diverse panel that included musicians, filmmakers, museum curators, a physicist, a tattoo artist, critics and Pete Connolly, an art director from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the Hewlett-Packard creative agency.
A film that Mr. Connolly created for his résumé inspired a series of commercials for H.P. that features celebrities like Jay-Z, Jerry Seinfeld and Serena Williams. They are all seen from the neck down while demonstrating how they live their lives digitally.
“We take three, four months to create a commercial, and we saw kids creating parodies on YouTube” in a fraction of the time, said Nancy Reyes, an account director on the Hewlett-Packard account at Goodby, Silverstein in San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group.
“The idea of giving these kids who are creating amazing things with computers a stage, a global stage, to show off their work seemed like a natural fit,” she added.
The decision to go back to MTV and mtvU — part of the MTV Networks division of Viacom — was made based on what was deemed a good result for “Meet or Delete,” a dating series that was introduced in 2006. Episodes can still be watched online at meetordelete.com.
Programs like “Meet or Delete” and “Engine Room,” which are created for marketers and feature products interwoven into the plots, are becoming more popular among executives at TV networks. Such shows, known on Madison Avenue as branded entertainment, have to walk a fine line between entertaining audiences and pitching to them.
“Our audiences don’t wait for a TV show or a Web site to get good,” said Ross Martin, senior vice president for programming at mtvU in New York. “They don’t like it, they hit stop or they hit delete.”
Thus, “if we compromise the quality of the work or the integrity of the content,” he added, “we lose our credibility and we’re done.”
Advertisers like Ford Motor, General Electric, Microsoft and Yahoo have also worked with mtvU on branded-entertainment projects, Mr. Martin said.
A search on Google for information about the mtvU reality series for Ford, “College 500,” which matches two student teams in a cross-country race, turns up almost 2.8 million results.
Viewers will be able to watch the episodes of “Engine Room” on mtvU in the United States, on various MTV channels in other countries and online — in nine languages — at mtvengineroom.com.
As the editing of the episodes nears completion, Mr. Martin said he could not discuss which team won the competition.
However, he added, “I will tell you, the winning team won by a point after six challenges.”

A tiny laptop(newdellcomputers)ii

2008-09-10T17:49:00.000-07:00

But in a French court ruling in 2005, Google was enjoined from allowing others to buy as a keyword the trademark brand of a French luxury goods maker, Louis Vuitton. For countries other than the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Google has a trademark complaint system, so holders can generally prevent their brands from being purchased as keywords by others.
The speed of Internet communication and heightened competition to claim and establish brands have drastically changed trademark tactics over the years. Compare the positioning and pre-emptive moves around cloud computing with the gradual pace of building one of the most valued brands in the world, Microsoft’s Windows.
The use of personal computer windows and graphical user windowing systems were around long before Microsoft announced its plans for a Windows operating system in 1983. The first version was introduced in 1985, and Microsoft did not file for a trademark until 1990. Its application was initially rejected as “merely descriptive.”
But, as so often, Microsoft persevered. It kept investing in advertising, branding and product development. It presented the Patent and Trademark Office with surveys showing people had come to associate the term Windows with Microsoft, and in 1995 the trademark examiners finally agreed.
With its cloud computing project Live Mesh, Microsoft is taking a far faster, more focused approach. It is employing Live, which it uses in other Internet offerings, like Windows Live and Xbox Live, as half of a two-word trademark — or composite mark, in legal terms. “Mesh networking is the generic category, but Live Mesh is Microsoft’s implementation and acts as a source identifier,” said Russell Pangborn, Microsoft’s director for trademarks.
One thing that has been undeniably transformed by computing and the Internet is the trademark office itself. Ms. Beresford, a professed “trademark nerd,” recalled that when she joined the office in 1979, searches for the same or “confusingly similar” trademarks began in the “search room.” The applications and registration documents were kept in wooden cabinets, filed alphabetically.
Trademarked images were kept in separate drawers and grouped into visual categories, she recalled, like “grotesque humans” (the Pillsbury doughboy) and “human body parts” (the Yellow Pages’ walking fingers).
Examining attorneys, Ms. Beresford noted, were issued rubber covers for their index fingers for going through files faster and with fewer paper cuts. The technology tools have been upgraded considerably since then. The work is now done mainly on computers, searching the Web and specialized trademark databases. Eighty-five percent of the office’s 390 examining attorneys work primarily from home.
The search room, Ms. Beresford observed, has “gone the way of the buggy whip.”

Tiny laptops, known as netbooks, have been cropping up like kudzu of late. Dell’s latest addition to the tangle is the Inspiron Mini 9, a two-pound laptop that runs Windows XP or Linux.

The Mini 9 has a 9-inch display and 1.6-gigahertz Intel Atom processor, part of Intel’s new line of low-power processors for mobile devices. It can hold up to 1 gigabyte of memory and comes with up to 16 gigabytes of solid-state storage.
Interestingly, Dell is not offering a traditional hard drive at all; instead it uses solid-state memory to store the operating system, programs and data. A $350 version of the laptop comes with 4 gigabytes of storage and runs Ubuntu, a popular version of the open-source operating system Linux. For $400 you gain Windows XP and 8 gigabytes of storage. The laptop is available at Dell.com.
The laptop has Wi-Fi but hackers have already opened the case and found the potential for built-in 3G wireless compatibility, although it may not be activated in the United States. It also has a larger keyboard than most other netbooks, a boon for users with even average-size fingers.

Press Release - (300 More New Dell Computers for Schools in Jamaica)

2008-09-09T17:22:00.000-07:00

Richard Stephenson, founder and principal organizer of the annual CCGI (Caribbean Classic Golf Invitational) Celebrity golf tournament and charity event, and President of the RISARC Foundation and CCGI Foundation has announced that 300 more New Dell computers are being shipped to Jamaica earmarked for delivery to the primary schools.
CCGI
Following the success of the 3rd Annual CCGI Celebrity Golf Tournament and Charity Event in Montego Bay, Jamaica, the principals of the primary schools that were presented with a certificate during the 2007 CCGI charity event will be receiving their allotment of the brand new Dell computers for their school’s technology learning centers.
“We are very excited about the computers being sent to Jamaica and we are very appreciative towards all the individuals and corporate sponsors that contributed to the success of the charity event in 2007, we would like to especially recognize our school sponsors and their sponsorships of computers for their adopted primary school” said Mr. Stephenson.
2007 School sponsors include: Capital and Credit Financial Group, RRCS and the Acquisto Family, Wells Fargo and Teddy Gordon Martin, Lorna Johnson, Cushman & Wakefield of California, Surrey Paving & Construction, Maxwell Sinclair, and Fire Mountain Beverage.
The 2007 charity event offered a robust schedule that included a memorable evening reception at the Rose Hall Great House, a formal evening gala and a 2-day golf tournament. Also, there were other activities at exotic venues including a special party where guests were ferried to a private island where the music played into the night and the evening was filled with fun, food and drinks.

Among the celebrities in attendance were actor-comedian and producer Cedric The Entertainer, olympian Ed Moses, actor and TV host Bill Bellamy, actors Tommy Davidson, Jeffery Anderson Gunter, Kiki Shepherd, Sandra “Pepa” Denton and Matthew Underwood among others.
The feedback has been tremendously positive from the teachers and students who have received computers from the initial shipment donated by the CCGI Foundation. These computers have become a valuable learning tool and have been incorporated into the school’s curriculum. Through the use of these computers, it has opened up unlimited amount of future potential and learning opportunities resulting in many glowing reports by the teachers and students boasting various projects and accomplishments.

In addition to this current shipment of 300 brand new Dell computers, prior CCGI Foundation contributions include an excess of 200 brand new Dell computers that were shipped and distributed to primary schools during CCGI’s first computer launch. With this current shipment, the value of the organization's overall contribution to the primary schools on just computers exceed $320,000.
“It is important for more individuals and companies to get involved. We are very proud of the children in Jamaica and we want to maximize their opportunity to be globally competitive with access to educational resources available through the use of computers. We have the ability to make a difference. I invite you to participate and be a part of making a difference for the children who are a part of Jamaica’s future.” says Alsion Roach from CCGI Executive Committee.
Continued success of this committed group can be attributed to some of the major sponsors in the past year’s event: RISARC, Bear Stearns, Law Offices of Stephenson, Acquisto and Colman, Christopher Floyd and S&D Electromechanical Contractors, RBTT Bank, Air Jamaica, IRIE FM Radio, JMMB, TVJ, and Cable & Wireless, to name a few.
Sponsors and Golfers are invited to join CCGI for the 4th Annual CCGI Celebrity Golf Tournament and Charity Event in Montego Bay, Jamaica - June 19 – 22, 2008. This highly anticipated annual event will be even more exciting in 2008. For more information visit www.caribbeangolfclassic.org.
ABOUT RISARC Foundation and CCGI FOUNDATION

The mission of RISARC and the CCGI Foundation is to collaborate and focus resources on preparing a new generation of leaders by building a platform for leadership development and innovative project initiatives. Proceeds from the tournament will be used to contribute to this mission by eventually providing computer labs in every primary school in Jamaica. More information can be found at www.caribbeangolfclassic.org on-line.

ABOUT RISARC

RISARC was established in 1990 as a healthcare consulting firm. RISARC began in the healthcare industry offering an all-inclusive array of hospital consulting services including Eligibility, Billing and Appeals on government and non-government payer accounts. In addition to these services, RISARC expanded to provide system solutions by merging industry experience with cutting-edge technology including the RMSe-bubble which supports the secure exchange of electronic attachments. RISARC now offers several system solution modules on an international level. More information can be found at www.risarc.com.

These donations were made during a press conference held at the Catherine Hall Primary School, one of the beneficiaries of the CCGI's benevolence. So far CCGI has handed over 500 computers, valued at US$500,000 to schools islandwide since the inaugural charity event teed off two years ago in Montego Bay.
Yesterday after the press conference, Las Vegas headliner Cedric the Entertainer, actor Anthony Anderson, NFL Hall of Fame honouree Marcus Allen, Hollywood leading man Richard Roundtree, Olympic gold medallist Ed Moses, comedian and TV star Tommy Davidson, actor and stand up comedian Bill Bellamy, Kiki Shepard, Sandra 'Peppa' Denton and Jeffrey Dujon were among the celebrities who participated in the first day of this year's tournament which was played at the Tryall golf course.
However, before the celebrities took off for Hanover, CCGI's president, Richard Stephenson remained steadfast in realising his dream of furnishing the over 400 primary schools with learning centres equipped with computers over the next five years. His resolve is more strenghtened by news that major US sponsors have indicated that they will hop aboard the staging of next year's event.
"We are gathering a lot of momentum, a lot of big sponsors across the US are starting to see that we are serious have already made commitment to come in a serious way next year," Stephenson told Sporting World yesterday.
The CCGI's president, who was born in Jamaica but now resides in the United States, noted that he was motivated to equip Jamaican primary schools with computers after identifying the need.
"The motivation for this was very simple, my son at six years old could run rings around kids down here who are 15, 16 years old. Computer language is definitely for now and the future," Stephenson said.

Exorcise the Demons That Come Preinstalled

2008-09-09T07:37:00.000-07:00

CALL it junkware. Or call it bloatware or demoware or adware. Computer users denounce it as crapware. It’s the software preinstalled on new Windows computers. (Bloatware is entirely a Windows issue; Macs don’t have such software.) It is there, usually in a trial version, to entice users to try a particular service or buy the full-featured program.
It might be a trial version of security programs from McAfee and Norton, graphics programs from Corel, multimedia applications from Roxio, or offers from Internet service providers like Earthlink or Internet phone service providers like Vonage. Even Microsoft has stripped-down versions of its software, like Office, offered up on the desktop of a new PC.
In other words, marketers are using the computer you just bought as a billboard. The bloatware is there because software makers or service providers pay the manufacturers to install it. Most PC makers, locked in a fierce price war, want the cash to bolster their thin profit margins.
“This stuff is just a headache for consumers. When new buyers turn on their PCs, they’re not expecting to see these buttons and icons, and they become confused,” said Michael Redmond, director of software for the NPD Group, a marketing consulting firm in Port Washington, N.Y. “On the other hand, manufacturers don’t want to turn away that free money.”
The applications pop up onto the Windows desktop as icons or toolbars when the computer is first booted.
The on-screen attractions invite surprised customers to try this security or DVD-editing program, or that office productivity or photo-editing application. The idea is to send new PC owners to sites to spend money for products or services, or entice them to use a service free for 30 or 90 days, and then buy it.
“Most people are shocked to find that after 90 days, they actually have to buy the program,” said Mark Reiman, a salesman and Geek Squad worker at the Best Buy in Carle Place, N.Y.
The bloatware may seem benign despite being a nagging annoyance, but these little programs can bedevil the machines. The free mini-applications can bog down the operating system and slow its start-up, clog the storage capacity of the hard drive and crowd the desktop with unwanted or unused icons or other irritating graphics.
“Some customers are pretty vocal when it comes to having this kind of software on their new systems,” said Anne Camden, a spokeswoman for Dell.
There is good reason to remove it. “Our internal tests show that just uninstalling the preinstalled software that you don’t want can improve a computer’s performance by 20 percent or more,” said David Zipkin, senior product manager for Windows at Microsoft. (Most experts believe 35 to 45 seconds is reasonable to boot Windows Vista.)
“We’re very aware of boot-up times for our machines,” said Mike Abary, a senior vice president for marketing at Sony, who is also well aware of customer criticism of just that issue. “We’ve identified which trial apps have caused a negative performance, and either removed them or worked with the vendors to improve them.”
That doesn’t mean that trial programs will be eliminated. Mr. Abary says 30 percent of Sony computer buyers eventually use some of the software — what he calls the “bounty.”
“I think that puts a healthy perspective on the matter,” he said.
The bloatware tempest came to a head in March, when Sony — for a few hours — introduced a program called Fresh Start. The feature let some business laptop buyers buy a system free of such software. For the service, Sony charged $50.
Eighteen hours later, after an army of consumers reacted angrily to the idea that they would have to pay to remove something they didn’t want in the first place, Sony rescinded the fee. Mr. Abary blamed internal miscommunication for the flap. “We corrected it immediately,” he said.
Tracking down and eliminating bloatware is not hard, but a person unfamiliar with system registries and computer configurations is going to need help. Here are some solutions:
The most severe solution — and the least recommended — is to completely erase the computer’s hard drive and reinstall Vista. The user would have to buy Vista (the cheapest version is about $100) and it may not install the proprietary drivers that run other devices like printers or keyboards connected to a particular manufacturer’s PC.
Instead, a user could start by clicking on the “programs and features” icon in the Windows control panel, and follow the steps for uninstalling programs. (Just deleting the icon from the desktop does nothing.)

Microsoft advises using its OneCare Live or Defender, which is part of Vista. Defender stops programs from starting up automatically each time Windows opens. To use it, click on the Start button in Windows, go to All Programs, then to Windows Defender. Find the Tools button, go to Software Explorer, and in the Category box, select Startup Programs.
Still with us? From the list, select the program to disable, and click Disable.
Windows Live OneCare takes the process a step further. It monitors which start-up applications are used only once in a while. Users choose from a list which programs to disable. This performance-optimizer scans for viruses and spyware as well. But it costs more money, $50 a year, though it can be used on up to three PCs.

Dell, a Bit Late, Gets Small

2008-09-06T22:48:00.000-07:00

As expected, Dell has joined the netbook party. On Thursday, the company unveiled the Mini 9, a $349 portable computer that weighs 2.28 pounds, has an 8.9-inch screen and is tailored for Internet-centric tasks, like surfing, chatting, uploading photos, blogging, watching videos and listening to music.
Wait, aren’t those the main tasks many people use their computer for? Yep, and that’s why the industry should be increasingly nervous about this new category of low-cost computers.
As we’ve written about earlier, the emergence of a category of Internet-centric computing devices challenges the already reed-thin profit margins of the PC industry. It inches the industry away from its long-standing goal –- and economic model — of building ever-more powerful computers.
It also challenges some of the biggest American PC companies, given that the pioneers in the category are lesser-known overseas manufacturers, like Asus, the maker of the Eee PC. And it challenges some of the suppliers, like Microsoft, that are tailored for a world of powerful computers, not basic ones that function chiefly as way stations to connect consumers to the cloud.
Indeed, the base model of Dell’s new machine includes a “mini” operating system made by Ubuntu (a $399 model has Windows XP Home). The machine does, however, use an Intel Atom chip, whereas some of the other low-cost PCs are using processors made by other manufacturers, challenging Intel’s dominance of the PC platform.
The Mini 9 comes in two colors (which Dell ostentatiously, though perhaps accurately, refers to as “Obsidian Black” and “Alpine White,” showing that the PC makers are bringing their stylistic efforts to this low-price category). One wonders whether this new category will, over the long-term, challenge the PC makers in their efforts to reproduce their favorite color: U.S. Dollar Green.
One last bit: Dell’s announcement about the new Mini 9 is a kind of polar opposite of an Apple product launch; in other words, the Mini 9 was a terribly kept secret. Michael Dell, the company’s chief executive, was carrying around a prototype earlier this year, stoking speculation about such a product.

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Much pricier with less option than Acer Aspire One and no non SSD HDD option. Mini9 w/1GB, 16GB SSD HDD –> $449. AspireOne w/1GB, 120GB non SSD HDD –> $349. Oh, and webcam is option al on the Mini9; standard on AspireOne.

from the net, lawrence….everything is on the net these days…you could also transfer the prog to a usb drive or buy a usb external cdrom…..If you have proprietary windows software that you need to install for work I suggest to ask your IT dep first…if not you have thousands of free programs at your fingertips if you choose Ubuntu linux…I have really no idea how many but just searched and found this article from 2004 where it mentioned 10,000……Ubuntu has access to heavy weight office suite OpenOffice and lighter word processors. All you got to do is search the type of program (i.e. word processor) and you will find plenty :).