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When you work with computers for a living, you are not always given much of a say in what brand of computer you will be using. For this reason, I've had the opportunity, and sometimes not in a positive way, of working with many different computer brands over the years. The first Dell I worked with, was 8 or 9 years ago.

At the time, I had been working with a Compaq, and while it wasn't a bad computer, gradually the hard drive began to fail. For a replacement, I was given the Dell. I'd heard the horror stories about Dells, of course, but the same stories were told about the Compaq computer, so I knew that a lot of the problems were user generated. I've never been one to blame the computer for something I do, so I decided to give it an open-minded try.

The computer I was using for base comparison was the Compaq that had just broken down, remembering back to when it was new, as best I could. There was a small discrepancy that I had to take into consideration. The Compaq was clocked to run at 333 MHz, and the Dell was rated at 366 MHz. That is a slight enough difference that while I would remember it, it really didn't enter into the evaluation.

The Dell also came with 256 MB of RAM, while I'd had to put RAM in the Compaq to get it to 256 MB of RAM. (New Compaq's off the shelf were coming with 128 MB of RAM at the time.) That was a plus in the favor of the Dell.

The Dell was a mini-tower while the Compaq was a desktop. I really had no preference at the time, but I was set up for the desktop, so had to do some major rearranging to accommodate the Dell. The plus, though a small one, when to the Compaq

To be as fair as possible, I didn't look much more deeply into what the Dell had compared to the Compaq, and instead tried the Dell out. To say the least, I was impressed.

Using exactly the same operating system, software, and peripherals, the Dell booted up in half the time it took the Compaq, and in general ran about twice as fast, regardless of the task I was doing. To be fair, some of that can be discounted as not remembering how long it took to do things on the Compaq when it was new, a year earlier. But I can say that the difference was very noticeable.

A year later, I was still using the Dell, and had far fewer problems in that year. What was more, it was still going strong, not showing any of the problems that the Compaq had shown. Capabilities were about the same for both, over all, and the hard drives were the same side, but it just seemed to be able to cope with

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