About a year ago, we bought four Alienware personal computers at Behavior. Alienware is widely acknowledged as the manufacturer of some of the best Windows-based personal computers on the market, and yet, as of yesterday, all four have had serious problems, and one of them has even broken down on two separate occasions. They all suffered the same problem — poor cooling requiring a fan replacement — and, at various times, each of my colleagues has been stopped cold during the course of several work days owing to this defect. It’s been a complete pain the butt, though less so for me, because I had opted instead to buy a much-less sexy Hewlett Packard earlier in the year. That one, however, has stopped running Microsoft Outlook reliably, and is such a mess of Windows patches, viruses, spyware and generally misbehaving software that I can barely use it anymore. Next week I’ll probably have to completely erase it and reinstall Windows, and everything else, from scratch.
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