A customer, who was strictly XP, installed a few new workstations (Optiplex) running Windows-7. There were problems with old software compatibility and I setup the W7 workstations to use VPC running XP. All would have been well if they had a a PC person in-house (not somebody like me 120 miles away) and there was a minor hoop you had to jump through with a USB devices. Other than that, no problems. In the end I purchased hard drives at Fry's Electronics, installed XP, and stored the W7 drives in a file cabinet. No more problems, no more calls. The workstations in question were replacing some 9 year old Dell workstations that never had a problem. With the same customer I typically swap out the file server after four or five years and the only problem I can recall over the years is a fan failing, which with the machine being on a service contract was promptly replaced. Bottom line, Dell has been a problem free solution. Second bottom line, do not require the of VPC to overcome compatibility issues.

Personally I use their laptops and workstations in the office. I know there may be better laptops with a few more features, etc. but in a predictable manner the Dells have been very satisfactory with decent support. I've had a couple of HP laptops and vow to never buy another one.


>Not by personally having debugged - out of my league and toolkit.
>But different sets of drivers showed different kind of symptoms -
>which were not visible on other machines running the same OS and VM system.
>
>As they deinstalled and reinstalled a few times this was the clearly changing difference.
>While no proof the driver to be at fault, this smells more from that area.
>
>>Can you specifically point to the Dell drivers/hardware as the problem and not the VM software?
>>
>>>The company I work for often had pure Dell turn of the century and they were telling it everybody.
>>>Now about 1/3, and one machine is giving trouble with the USB port in some VM setups and driver versions.