ORAC
Thanks. You've said it all (as far as Dell is concerned)
Those USB solutions would be fine if I'd acquired the notebook second-hand (and didn't mind carting around additional junk - which you do anyway, because they achieve compactness by requiring "alternation") .
Re the comment about expecting Dell to support other OS's. I'd always found that to be a point of pride amongst other purveyors of hardware. In fact I had a high spec Elonex laptop some years ago and it lasted me for about five years and was always supported (and I'd guess the guy I sold it to wouldn't still be running the Win 3.1 it came with. He's probably upgraded to something above the Win NT4 it had on when I sold it to him. Prior to that it ran my son's BeOS and Linux. Its sound worked under any OS and Elonex are a little UK concern who make their kit up from off the shelf componentry. If i'd bought a Inspiron 2500 with win 95 I couldn't imagine remaining with that buggy (and now MS unsupported) OS.
In fact if you look at the Win 2000 HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) you'll find that the NeoMagic Card 256 Magic Media (WDM) is listed there as WLP1.1 - rather than just "compatible" (that means that it wasn't immediately compatible but was verified as being so at a later date - after Win2K had been out a while). What that tells me is that NeoMagic just washed their hands of all the people they'd flogged their cards to and couldn't be bothered writing a Win2K or NT4 sound-driver. Dell of course had nothing by way of contract with NeoMagic under which they could enforce provision of a driver - so it becomes an auto cop-out.
Thus if all you compliant people out there have become inured to getting very little for the support and the warranty that's factored into the purchase price or for the extended warranty you paid for (like me) then you probably also don't mind getting done over for all the little fees and charges and impositions that come along. i.e. You'd also not be the type to query any such fee, charge, impost or levy.
You probably think that planned obsolescence and built-in design defects are a fair-enough marketing gimmick and that frustration is par for any course. But I'm personally finding it an everyday challenge to keep on top of that sort of commercial dishonesty.
Example: You decide to place all your insurance policies (motor, home, boat, sailplane, rental properties, home contents etc) with the one company because they offer a multi-policy discount. At the time that you move the business across you find the proposition of an overall 10% off a very competitive quote to be quite attractive. Five years down-track and in a discussion with a junior at said company you learn that you've never had any such discount, it's not reflected in your policy coding. You ask to speak to a supervisor and discover that after he's "investigated why", it's actually all your fault. It was never up to the sales man to explain to you that the policies had to be lumped together via a coding for you to attract that discount. If some properties were in your wife's name or child's name (car etc) or there was a minor spelling mistake then the software rejected any such automatic "lumping together for the promised discount - and it simply didn't happen. Five years later and they claim that it is irreversible. Why? Because that's how their software is written. Makes you wonder how many poor dupes the SGIO is ripping off eh? You ask for a letter detailing how and why it happened and there's just no way that they will admit anything in writing - and in fact your earlier 10% contract is now (they assure you) just something that you'd thought you'd tee'd up - but was in fact a non-event by dint of it never having happened. So why couldn't I tell from the premium I was charged, you might ask? That's easy, because the policies were moved across as they expired with other companies and the discounts didn't cut in until they had been. That's how they make sure you aren't vetting their actual implementation. After that, annual increments plus adjustments to sums assured and no-claims discounts serve to disguise the missing 10% (lost in the static). What about Telstra? You have a second phone line put in and it's a data line (fax/internet) so you wouldn't be at all interested in paying extra for it to be a silent number. Five years down-track and you ask for a breakdown of your bill and find that they've been charging you that extra throughout (but can't say why and it too is irreversible).
My point is that if you are in the habit of writing such abuse off as a matter of course and allow your hard-earnt dough to get frittered away by cunningly written software, rip-off imposts, inexplicable "policies" and suave put-offs, then you're just the sort of dupe they love (as a customer). I could go on with many more examples -but I don't want to bore you. They are just two examples that I dealt with today. Next week, with SGIO, I'll be addressing the $100 excess that I was charged (by the repairer) for my wife's car repair under her nil excess policy. Then I'll ring Brian Gardner Motors and ask why they charged me for six spark plugs on my four cylinder car's servicing. Get the idea? Two weeks hence I'll be in the Small Claims Court asking why I should pay a roofer $6000 when the job he did he wasn't qualified to do (as his Builder's Licence had been revoked) - and because it leaks like a sieve. I may then be in the right mood to ring the Local Council office and ask why they needed to adjust a particular administrative fee from $50 to $500? (for a permit to knock down a house). Was it just because they needed to generate revenue?
Dell (and their rorting ways) is only part of a larger problem.