LGR Tech Tales – How Dell Dominated PCs
LGR Tech Tales – How Dell Dominated PCs
This episode covers the humble beginnings, rapid rise to success, and eventual dominance of Dell Computer Corporation. Join me in LGR Tech Tales, looking at stories of technological inspiration, failure, and everything in-between!
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Watching this while sitting at my Dell laptop
I’m still using a Dell Gaming Laptop (Dell Inspiron 14 7447, i5-4210H, GTX 850M, 8 GB RAM)
Lgr these are absolutely awesome we need more and more tech tales !
Dell computers in the early 2000s were s*** especially during the XP days you can play to $3,000 for a machine using last year’s parts while the Dell representative tells you that this is modern top-of-the-line Hardware my first Dell computer I seen it in a magazine and ordered one over the phone and let the on phone representative talk me through what I was looking for my response was the only thing right about the entire system that was sold to me was the the Pentium 4 processor they lied to me about it having a video card leaving misrepresented the amount of ram that the system had telling me that it had it had 512 megabytes of RAM when it only had 256 and the motherboard did not have a PCI Express slot as this was becoming the standard on motherboards in 2002-2003 and this s*** hole of a system costed me over $2,500 I was so unhappy my parents purchased a Gateway computer for less than $1,000 the same year with the PCI Express slot and a Pentium 4 processor in 512 megabytes of RAM less than two years later I was forced to buy another computer because of system instability causing crashes and this random annoyances ended up buying a compact with an Athlon processor and a PCI Express slot 1 gig of RAM for $500 roughly 20 months after my two and a half thousand dollars conundrum with a computer
Just picked up a 2003 Dell LCD this morning. Got home and this was on my YouTube feed. Cool!
The first laptop I remember was a Dell where I played some CD-ROM game in ~2004-2005.
2021: I’m watching this on a really slick Dell monitor 🙂
"Boomers", "Millennials" get all of the "press" and, except for vague references to "The Breakfast Club", "Gen X" NEVER got "status". Dell is an Xer, and "we" need to remember that.👍😊👍
I remember our first Dell, a pentium 2 450 with 64 MB Ram and a 10 Gb HDD. I played so much TFC on that thing. As a child of an IT parent, my mom was always bringing home the coolest new optiplex and latitude business machines, which were always a lot nicer looking and sturdier than their home counterparts. I eventually worked at that company too, can’t tell you how many dells have been through my house. We have a closet full of desktops and notebooks to this day.
You forgot about the part where Dell started making proprietary components like RAM and the decision to designing their motherboards up-side-down… Dick move Mr. Dell.
The name’s Dell. Michael Dell.
The apostrophe in PC’s Limited always bugs me
I am watching this on a Dell G5
They still make some killer monitors. In 2018 I bought an art monitor for $500 that competed with $800 art monitors in color accuracy.
7:00 A leveraged buyout? Of his own baby, the company he’d founded and built for so many years? He pushed a massive amount of debt into a healthy company, just to acquire it? That… is both saddening, and completely insane.
i was given 2 dells and broke 1 trying to put a second gen i5 inn it and seeing what would happen. wana know wat happened. i broke the socket
As a 5-year postscript, it looks like after Michael Dell came back to the company, he did what he always did in tough times: he hunkered down and went back to being a big-business digital tech supplier. While Dell spent the last 5 years continuing to sell desktop and laptop units for personal use, their main focus has shifted back to selling hard to businesses and institutions (schools, hospitals, etc.), including servers, thin clients and related infrastructure pieces. They largely dropped out of the printer game (which is good; Dell printers were rather awful), and they never really got into networking equipment (thanks to Cisco’s chokehold on that market, at least in terms of enterprise-level networking), but other than that they do now boast a very impressive array of tech from back-end to front-end. Servers of all kinds, big monster towers for research and industrial needs, thin clients, desktops, laptops, and a pretty decent line of Windows tablets (not very big, but certainly more than suitable for most business/institutional needs).
I have to admit, while I am very suspect of many business gurus who get rich seemingly from nothing, I think Michael Dell struck the right chord here. While he obviously isn’t some inventor like, say, Steve Wozniak, he DID actually find a way to streamline the process of building and selling computers in a way that keeps costs low, profits high, and delivers a reasonably stable product. He’s not a technological genius, but I consider him at least a competent, savvy business executive who understands the nature of the goods and services he’s selling.
Going forward, I see Dell having very serious competition from Lenovo (who have risen as a serious contender for both business and commercial sales), as well as HP (who were somewhat staggering after Dell’s own resurgence, but are now starting to push back hard in all the areas Dell is doing well in).
Dude your getting a Dell. I used to trash pick these computers all the time. I used a Dell for a long time because it was free.
watching this on my Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Series lol
I never will forget the first Dell laptop I bought. Everything was great until the warranty expired then it would continuously overheat and shut off until finally the motherboard warped and several BGA IC’s lifted off the board leaving me with a very expensive paperweight that I never finished paying for.
I remember back in the 90s my aunt saying that Dell was the best. I think she bought us one. …Or made one from scratch. I don’t remember.
Thinking about getting the dell precision workstation to be honest but every time I’m on the website all I keep thinking is dude your getting a dell. I still have a dell XPS desktop from 1998 that still runs perfectly on windows 98. I did have a Inspiron in 2004 and that thing sucked in my opinion.
Dell made way too many Optiplex PCs. It’s cheaper to get one of them and to use the product key for another Windows 10 PC then it is to actually buy a standalone copy of Windows 10. You can get a lot of extra ram sticks and CPUs from those computers too, or you can just use one as a cheap, slow, but usable computer. Companies back in the day bought those in huge bulk…
Once again a great vid insight. I liked Dell for the fact you could buy a secondhand Dell ie laptop and go online to download any missing drivers OR if you upgraded they provided the drivers for the new OS FREE! The cheap Dell Optiplex we had lasted for over 5 years before it started to have problems but for £60 ? XP op.
“Dude! You’re getting a Dell!”
"Dude, You’re Getting Adell!" Oh sweet, my favorite Disgaea protagonist.
Dells are seen as very reliable computers here in South America, also they are used in my country’s main airline to supply software updates to Boeing 737 Max’s. I personally have two dells, an old latitude and an Inspiron 5000. Not flashy at all but they get the job done. I am also building a desktop, because of course they suck for modern gaming haha.
Dell absolutely dominates in the SMB (Small / Medium Business) IT market. Workstations, laptops, servers, and networking gear. They have an aggressive partnership with IT provider companies to get them to resell dell. Dell prices are relatively competitive on their own, but they give DEEP discounts to partner resellers in order to get their partners to be exclusive dell resellers to end clients. The more volume a partner like an IT company moves, the bigger of a discount the partner can qualify for. Having worked in SMB at several companies, I have seen first hand how Dell dominates. Also, at least in recent years, their build quality is unmatched, particularly with their intuitive tool-less design for desktops and servers that make them very admin friendly to work on. Poweredge servers, optiplex desktops, and latitude laptops are ubiquitous in the SMB space, and also very common in gov’t and education
Just saying, that’s a beautiful ad at 3:50.
What happened to the Enron portion of Dell’s history? My first computer i actually used was a Dell 320sx. I did have a compaq deskpro 286 before that but i mainly took it apart and put it back together a bunch of times. The Dell had windows 3.1 on it so it was much more interesting.
My god, some of the Dell cases were convuluted though, sometimes clever 🙂
I have a Dell Latitude e6420.
And to think the Dell Dude has worked with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
I like that Dell never aimed for the top and tried to take over the PC market like everyone else did, most pull an Icarus and end up worse then when they started, but this tech tales is a nice showcase of the ups and downs of staying above water and how you can find a happy place within your own space without having to be better then everyone, its a mentality I wish more businesses would adopt since alot of corporate greed is part of what makes many gradually slip into being horrible places to work for.
Not only I am a computer user, I am a computer technology fan and a fan of Dell. Hence, this is my first Dell keyboard that I should have purchased nearly twenty years ago. Dell computers are more efficient and reliable computers that perform better than the other leading brands. It took a defective computer with a dead motherboard for me to buy a Dell computer. I have called my microcomputer my keyboard because it is my powerful typewriter. My Dell Inspiron [keyboard] has lasted for 4 years with no problems. The first keyboard I had which was the Cybernet ZPC-9000 and my Dell Inspiron 5488 are all-in-one personal computers. Cybernet had the computer peripherals in the console (keyboard), and Dell had the computer inside the monitor. I miss using Microsoft Office XP Professional programs with Microsoft Windows XP Professional operating system, but I am doing fine on Microsoft Office 2019 Professional and using Microsoft Windows 10 Pro. Also, I learned more techniques for using the business productivity programs in ways that I would not be taught in a job.
Alienware is a HUGEEEEEEE point of interest for Dell and you didn’t even cover a full 2 seconds of it??????? Alienware is BY FAR the biggest PC related draw for Dell and with the “UFO” about to launch in the next year or so which is gona make the Nintendo switch look like a toddlers toy and will be running Windows 10 OS. Dell makes HUGE headlines these days and even more game changing in the near future.
4:52 Cringe
That picture is so old school internet.
When people used to say "Surfing the net"
i always saw Dell as state of the art machine company
They say to make it on YouTube you need to have as solid and professional an identity as possible out the gate, and LGR is an exemplar of this. I legit could not tell this was from 6 years ago
Conclusion: Dell’s founder is Lawful Good and McAfee’s founder is Chaotic Neutral
First PC I bought with my own money was a Dell, dude that was in 2005.
my first somputer was dell
My first real computer was a dell 4800. I had built one with a 800mh AMD with hammy down parts before that but it was trash.
And I’m watching this on one right now.
I dedicate this video to my old Dell Dimension 4500 and Inspiron 6400
Causes of death: BSOD
They are now also the Number 1 scammers in the world.
I could have become the leader of a superpower company if I’d lived in the eighties or ninties
Dell was my favorite Computer Company from Austin Texas. Even was still a private company for a long time!
To be fair, Dell made the best desktops for ultra budget gaming rigs(HP and friends put in neat proprietary features like weird power cables, reverse pinned memory and nonstandard cpu coolers because f*** you) and still makes the only high end laptops that I would ever consider buying new
Dells are trash because they are for business and school.