The Problem with Dell
At work, I have a brand new quad core Dell running Vista. The machine is super fast and rock solid…except for the video card and driver.
Dell sells this computer with a defective video driver. Icons sometimes vanish until you move your mouse over them, at which time they eventually paint. The screen shows frequent painting artifacts — sometimes the entire login screen is blank, but you can still type. Software updates from ATI crash and burn.
This is true for other people’s PCs as well, so I know it is not a fluke with my machine. I have first hand experience with Vista at home, and I know that some video cards work fine with Vista. This particular configuration — the one Dell chooses to sell — does not work properly.
Yes, Vista has a lot of problems. I get it.
In this case, however, Dell is the problem. They knowingly sell this particular video card with their own PCs. 20 minutes of basic usage reveals painting artifacts and bugs. If Dell cared about customers, they would reject shitty hardware like this. Dell is huge. They can very easily tell ATI: “Sorry, not good enough. We refuse to cheapen our PCs with your flaky hardware and drivers.”
Dell does not have any customers. Dell has consumers. Shitty hardware is great for consumption.
A few years ago, I had a similar experience with a Sony computer. It shipped with faulty nVidia drivers for XP Media Center Edition, and no drivers from Sony or from Nvidia fixed the problem. This was one of several factors that convinced me to switch to Mac.
I think video drivers are a large part of Windows hardware problems. I used to think that ATI drivers were more stable than nVidia but your story makes me think otherwise. For now, I’m happier running XP and Vista under VMWare Fusion (when needed at all).
I should have added: there’s no excuse for OEMs like Dell, HP or Sony to ship with faulty drivers. I can understand if you get an incompatibility later, but the combination of hardware, drivers and OS from the factory should be compatible. Period.