where can I find a list of compatible motherboard upgrades for myDell XPS 420?

On Thu, 27 Dec 2018 12:51:53 -0600, Mark Lloyd
wrote:

On 12/26/18 8:11 PM, Mayayana wrote:

[snip]

If you want a new motherboard to match the old, they
might sell it. But this is where the downside of Dell really
shows up. They customize their builds and provide custom
drivers from their site. They go to great lengths to prevent
you from doing anything but using their computer, as they
sold it to you.

I'm taking care of a Dell for a friend, and the power supply quit after
a power outage. It was a unique design and the motherboard was made to
work with it. A standard MS wouldn't fit in that case. If I couldn't
find a used one of those odd power supplies on eBay, I'd never have been
able to fix that PC. It's going to need a new fan (IIRC, a standard part
but hard to replace) soon.

Drives (hard, floppy, CD) and mouse / keyboard are standard parts.


If I've understood you correctly, you might consider replacing the
case instead. It would probably be less expensive.

On 12/27/18 7:54 AM, Mayayana wrote:
"Paul" wrote

| You can still find local companies who will build
| up a PC from parts for you. And they can provide the
| knowledge to ensure it works properly. And put a
| "retail" OS on it for you.
|

Those are all gone where I live.

I found one in east Texas: http://www.cpu4u.com/

[snip]

I'm also not as picky as you with parts, I think. My main
box is XP, with a basic Asus board and an AMD FX-8300
8-core. I love it. And it was cheap.
I have a FX-8350 (4Ghz 8-core), the fastest at the time I got it. The
little fan that came with it didn't cool it very well, and sounded like
a leaf blower. The fan I put on instead solved both problems.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few
virtues" -- Abraham Lincoln

In message , Ken Blake
writes:
On Thu, 27 Dec 2018 12:51:53 -0600, Mark Lloyd
wrote:

On 12/26/18 8:11 PM, Mayayana wrote:

[snip]

If you want a new motherboard to match the old, they
might sell it. But this is where the downside of Dell really
shows up. They customize their builds and provide custom
drivers from their site. They go to great lengths to prevent
you from doing anything but using their computer, as they
sold it to you.

I'm taking care of a Dell for a friend, and the power supply quit after
a power outage. It was a unique design and the motherboard was made to
work with it. A standard MS wouldn't fit in that case. If I couldn't
find a used one of those odd power supplies on eBay, I'd never have been
able to fix that PC. It's going to need a new fan (IIRC, a standard part
but hard to replace) soon.

Drives (hard, floppy, CD) and mouse / keyboard are standard parts.


If I've understood you correctly, you might consider replacing the
case instead. It would probably be less expensive.

Except he said "It was a unique design and the motherboard was made to
work with it", which I take to mean it at least had odd requirements, if
not having unusual connectors too.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

A dishwasher is rubbish at making treacle sponge. - Marjorie in UMRA, 2017-1-15

"Mark Lloyd" wrote
|
| I found one in east Texas: http://www.cpu4u.com/
|

Thanks. Not a lot of variety, but their site works very well.
Good future reference.
I'm surprised how expensive the new lines of CPUs are.
I paid $65 for my 8-core in late 2015. The current crop seems
to be in the $200-$800 range.

On 12/27/2018 5:49 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Mark Lloyd" wrote
|
| I found one in east Texas: http://www.cpu4u.com/
|

Thanks. Not a lot of variety, but their site works very well.
Good future reference.
I'm surprised how expensive the new lines of CPUs are.
I paid $65 for my 8-core in late 2015. The current crop seems
to be in the $200-$800 range.


yea, and some of the motherboards have reached some fantastically high
prices also. Oh and don' forget the graphics cards although they were
always high.

I was considering building myself a new unit but now I'm hesitating. due
to price, may be cheaper to buy a new one from Mmory Express here in
Winnipeg, They have some great i7s at some descent prices.

Rene

"Rene Lamontagne" wrote

| yea, and some of the motherboards have reached some fantastically high
| prices also. Oh and don' forget the graphics cards although they were
| always high.
|
| I was considering building myself a new unit but now I'm hesitating. due
| to price, may be cheaper to buy a new one from Mmory Express here in
| Winnipeg, They have some great i7s at some descent prices.
|

I wouldn't be surprised. I think I spent about $400 to build
this box in 2015. That was also the cost of a low-end PC.
Today there are still PCs like HP for only $400-500. But the
parts prices are crazy. Though I recently bought a new
Samsung 500 GB SSD for use as my second drive. Only about
$70. Suposedly that's $50 off, though all the stores were
selling it for that price. I couldn't afford not to buy it.

That's a case where I ended up at Microcenter. I went
to 2 Best Buys. They claimed the item was on sale. Neither
store had it in stock. Staples also didn't have it, but tried to
upsell me to one of 3 other items instead. Microcenter.....
yes, 120 in stock!
I've run into that same problem before with Best Buy.
I don't know where they make their money. They always
seem to be out of stock.

Mayayana wrote:

I've run into that same problem before with Best Buy.
I don't know where they make their money. They always
seem to be out of stock.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatsp.../#4d4215f2b443

"By restructuring the business, cutting costs, cleaning
up the balance sheet, and focusing on differentiation
through customer service, this firm has begun to thrive
despite the Amazon (AMZN) effect."

So Forbes doesn't know why either.

In Physics, this is called "levitation", when
you can't see the "stick" holding the item up.

Maybe it's the sale of all those
Extended Warranty Plans :-/

Paul

"Paul" wrote

| focusing on differentiation
| through customer service

I kept reading that over, wondering what it means.
Maybe they mean that Best Buy has clerks to talk
to while Amazon doesn't? It is true that it's usually not
hard to find a clerk to tell me that they don't have the
item I want in stock.

Before SSDs it was Tracphones.
They carry a number of buy-the-minutes phones.
They just don't stock them. Another time it was
landline phones. Both times I found what I wanted
at Target, of all places.

What really hurts them, in my mind, is the incessant
advice that I can get the item at their online store.
As though that were the same thing. Then I point out
that if I wanted to buy online I'd almost certainly not
end up buying at bestbuy.com. (Or staples.com.) I
went to them because they have an actual store,
not because they have the cheapest price in North
America.
They seem to be trying to herd their customers into
their online operations, in order to save money, oblivious
to the fact that online is actually not their business
model.

There's also a darker aspect to this: All kinds of
businesses are experimenting with cutting costs by
eliminating humans. Recently a Stop and Shop opened
near me. We went in to have a look. Very high prices.
Far too much junk without enough food. (I can get
condoms(!) and shampoo and 8 kinds of frozen, farmed
cocktail shrimp from Thailand or Vietnam, should I want
Agent Orange for dinner, but they only had haddock and
scallops in the tiny seafood section.) The entire center
of the giant store was devoted to cooked food for
takeout, and snack packaging. It's all gimmicks. We did
pick a few things to buy, but then had to leave it all
there because there was a line of 20+ people at the
checkout: One line for 2 registers and one line for 10
clerkless checkouts! They're trying to eliminate the need
for register clerks. But no one was in line at the parking-
meter-style self-checkouts. They were all waiting for
the 2 clerks.

I may never go into that store again. It
represents every strategy in the book intended to make
lots of bucks without having to do your job. I expect it
will end up like Home Depot, where items and brands
change regularly based on what computer analysis tells
them provides the biggest profit margin: Low margin on
chicken legs and high margin on 6 oz trail mix with
chocolate kisses and faux dried mango chunks made of
gelatin? Then let's shrink this meat section and add a
snack bar! Concentrate on the Slim Jims. They're higher
profit margin than the fresh beef!

On Thu, 27 Dec 2018 23:22:35 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , Ken Blake
writes:
On Thu, 27 Dec 2018 12:51:53 -0600, Mark Lloyd
wrote:

On 12/26/18 8:11 PM, Mayayana wrote:

[snip]

If you want a new motherboard to match the old, they
might sell it. But this is where the downside of Dell really
shows up. They customize their builds and provide custom
drivers from their site. They go to great lengths to prevent
you from doing anything but using their computer, as they
sold it to you.

I'm taking care of a Dell for a friend, and the power supply quit after
a power outage. It was a unique design and the motherboard was made to
work with it. A standard MS wouldn't fit in that case. If I couldn't
find a used one of those odd power supplies on eBay, I'd never have been
able to fix that PC. It's going to need a new fan (IIRC, a standard part
but hard to replace) soon.

Drives (hard, floppy, CD) and mouse / keyboard are standard parts.


If I've understood you correctly, you might consider replacing the
case instead. It would probably be less expensive.

Except he said "It was a unique design and the motherboard was made to
work with it", which I take to mean it at least had odd requirements, if
not having unusual connectors too.


Yes, I know he said that. That's the main reason I said "If I've
understood you correctly." I didn't think the motherboard wouldn't fit
into a standard case, but you might be right and it won't.

Mayayana wrote:


What really hurts them, in my mind, is the incessant
advice that I can get the item at their online store.
As though that were the same thing.

The Best Buy web page uses "drop ship" like Newegg, Walmart,
and Staples do.

It's the scourge of the Internet, where ****ty little
hole-in-the-wall operations present items for sale as if
Best Buy is selling them.

On the Newegg site, you can click a radio button to
select "Newegg only" or "Newegg plus scummy sellers",
so at least on that site, you have a choice.

One other button I'd like, especially on my main go-to
computer store, is a button that shows "brick-and-mortar stock".
So if there are a thousand USB Flash sticks for sale online
(all of them actually sold by the computer store chain),
and only three of those sticks are regularly stocked at the
local store, I could click a button and see what
"impulse buy" items are available. That would save me one
hell of a lot of time.

Yet, no operation seems to be "tuned for customer service"
enough to do that for me. Who wants to wait ten days
for a $5 USB stick to come from Pago Pago ? I don't.

Paul

"Mayayana" on Fri, 28 Dec 2018 08:49:35
-0500 typed in alt.windows7.general the following:

There's also a darker aspect to this: All kinds of
businesses are experimenting with cutting costs by
eliminating humans.

I noticed yesterday, that Costco now has ordering kiosks for their
food court.

But no calendars, the week before the New Year.
--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?

On Fri, 28 Dec 2018 11:08:51 -0500, Wolf K
wrote:

On 2018-12-27 22:15, Mayayana wrote:
"Rene Lamontagne" wrote

| yea, and some of the motherboards have reached some fantastically high
| prices also. Oh and don' forget the graphics cards although they were
| always high.
|
| I was considering building myself a new unit but now I'm hesitating. due
| to price, may be cheaper to buy a new one from Mmory Express here in
| Winnipeg, They have some great i7s at some descent prices.
|

I wouldn't be surprised. I think I spent about $400 to build
this box in 2015. That was also the cost of a low-end PC.
Today there are still PCs like HP for only $400-500. But the
parts prices are crazy. Though I recently bought a new
Samsung 500 GB SSD for use as my second drive. Only about
$70. Suposedly that's $50 off, though all the stores were
selling it for that price. I couldn't afford not to buy it.

That's a case where I ended up at Microcenter. I went
to 2 Best Buys. They claimed the item was on sale. Neither
store had it in stock. Staples also didn't have it, but tried to
upsell me to one of 3 other items instead. Microcenter.....
yes, 120 in stock!
I've run into that same problem before with Best Buy.
I don't know where they make their money. They always
seem to be out of stock.



Generally speaking, you can no longer build a unit at a better
price/performance ration than the ready-builts. At one time, you could
build last year's bleeding-edge gear for about the same price as a
current plain-vanilla ready-built. I did that four times. Looked into
doing the same about a year ago, decided against it.

The major exceptions are very-high end machines built for gaming,
massive video creation/editing etc. These tend to be custom-built in the
real world, too, so building your own just means doing what the other
guys do.

Building your own used to be a pretty good money-saver. Now it's a
hobby. and like all hobbies, it costs. You decide whether the fun is
worth the money. :-)


I agree. It's been a long time since I built my own. It's no longer
money saving *and* it has a big disadvantage:

If it was a bought model or a built-for-you model, if something
doesn't work properly, you can tell the manufacturer and get him to
fix it.

If you built it yourself and something doesn't work properly, there's
usually a question about which component is defective, and placing the
blame in the right palace can be very difficult: talk to the
motherboard manufacturer and they tell may you "don't tell us about
it, get Microsoft to fix it." Talk to Microsoft and they tell may you
"don't tell us about it, get he motherboard manufacturer to fix it."
And so on.

That's the main reason I no longer build for myself.

On Fri, 28 Dec 2018 09:34:20 -0800, pyotr filipivich
wrote:

"Mayayana" on Fri, 28 Dec 2018 08:49:35
-0500 typed in alt.windows7.general the following:

There's also a darker aspect to this: All kinds of
businesses are experimenting with cutting costs by
eliminating humans.

I noticed yesterday, that Costco now has ordering kiosks for their
food court.



You mean kiosks for placing food orders? Some Costcos (our local one,
for example) already have them.

Ken Blake wrote:


I agree. It's been a long time since I built my own. It's no longer
money saving *and* it has a big disadvantage:

If it was a bought model or a built-for-you model, if something
doesn't work properly, you can tell the manufacturer and get him to
fix it.

If you built it yourself and something doesn't work properly, there's
usually a question about which component is defective, and placing the
blame in the right palace can be very difficult: talk to the
motherboard manufacturer and they tell may you "don't tell us about
it, get Microsoft to fix it." Talk to Microsoft and they tell may you
"don't tell us about it, get he motherboard manufacturer to fix it."
And so on.

That's the main reason I no longer build for myself.

I don't think it was money saving as such.

The idea is, to get some kind of customization you wanted.

On my first machine, I wanted a SCSI bus. I already had 4+
SCSI drives and associated cables. I felt the need to have
support for using those drives when required.

If I'd bought a SCSI card as a plug-in item, it had
"enterprise pricing". At the time, it might have cost $400
for a cheap one.

But by shopping for just the right motherboard (P2B-S),
I could have a SCSI chipset added for almost nothing (when
compared to a $400 ripoff).

On my first Core2 build, I was "taken" by the option of a
motherboard that had both an AGP video slot, as well as
a PCI Express video slot. Dell would never offer such a
thing. This would allow me to use an existing (AGP) video
card, without preventing me from buying a PCI Express
video card in future.

And since this is a Windows 7 group, we can address
the "Skylake" thing. Since Microsoft doesn't want people
running Windows 7 on a Kaby Lake, we get to specify
and build up Skylake systems with the flexibility to
support both Windows 7 and Windows 10. And that would be
another example of an "obscure customization" intended
to respond to market forces. FRAPS works in Windows 7.
Gdigrab works at 60FPS on Windows 7 and only
30FPS on Windows 10. There might be specific things
that don't work properly on Windows 10 that I might
like, so I build up a Windows 7 hardware system to
cover the various possibilities.

Paul

Ken Blake on Fri, 28 Dec 2018 10:52:53 -0700
typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
On Fri, 28 Dec 2018 09:34:20 -0800, pyotr filipivich
wrote:

"Mayayana" on Fri, 28 Dec 2018 08:49:35
-0500 typed in alt.windows7.general the following:

There's also a darker aspect to this: All kinds of
businesses are experimenting with cutting costs by
eliminating humans.

I noticed yesterday, that Costco now has ordering kiosks for their
food court.

You mean kiosks for placing food orders?

Yep

Some Costcos (our local one, for example) already have them.

They were "new" this time.

Costco tried the self-checkout stands. Apparently, management was
not happy with them, so they were converted back to "regular".

On a complete sidebar: there have been a number of times I have
thought "It would be nice if they had an 'express' lane, but that kind
of goes against the concept of 'warehouse store'."


--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?