As a follow up to yesterday’s posts, I thought I would mention some problems I had with Dell’s website while trying to compare prices of Windows and Linux models. While website glitches might not seem like a big deal, when they add up, they give a really bad impression of the website and company.

The first problem I noticed is that pages will sometimes just not load. Reloading the page usually fixes this, but it is still annoying.

The second and more serious problem that I noticed is that most products have an option to add them to your wishlist, which is a handy way of comparing the specs of two machines, but a few replace that with an option to add the product to your saved items. The problem is, your saved items and your wishlist are two completely different lists! That means that I can easily compare most products, unless one of those products happens to be a “saved items” product.

Finally, it seems that Dell is constantly changing the products listed on the Ubuntu page. You may remember that a while ago I noticed that the number of computers available with Ubuntu had dropped from 4 to 2, but it returned the next day. Well, it happened again. Yesterday, there were five computers available with Ubuntu; today there are four.

In my opinion, if Dell wants their Ubuntu machines to sell, they need to quit hiding them away on some unknown part of their site, offer all (or most - some exceptions for mobile wireless and stuff which may not be supported are OK) of the configuration items of the Windows versions, and stop changing their offerings every time you turn around.

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