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I will never buy or recommend another Dell product, especially not their stupid laptops. Dell is terrible. I've been buying their crap for like half as long as I've been alive, but I'm afraid those years have not been so good to Dell.

Dell is absolutely full of crap. I have this Inspiron, right, and I have replaced the power supply to it something like five times now. You may recall my previous post about this. The thing has a terrible strain relief and a dumb extra wire and the cable breaks away from the connector in normal operation all the time. My parents have the same laptop, and have had the exact same problem I think twice now.

Dell support is no help. They have basically told me from square one to go fuck myself. "That's not covered", they told me the first time I complained about it about six months after I got the damn laptop. Since then, they've told me that I'm putting pressure on the cord or some crap like that (Wrong; I make a concerted effort not to touch or even move the damn thing because I know a freak gust of wind will utterly destroy it. When it does start to go bad, I hold the damn thing together with my right hand while using the computer with my left, which usually gives me an extra two weeks of use) and that I'm making things up and nobody ever has this problem (It is actually an extremely common problem, as made excruciatingly obvious by a quick Google search and the fact that the damn thing has a customer rating of TWO STARS ON DELL'S OWN STORE).

So, because Dell refuses to replace a poorly-designed part that must cost them something like six dollars to make, I've had to replace it out of my own pocket every time, and boy oh boy does Dell charge out the ass for that thing. It is seventy bucks.

And you can't just buy a cheap knockoff adapter, oh no! Dell put in some stupid nonsense so it can detect whether or not you're using a GENUINE DELL ADAPTER and it refuses to charge the battery if you're not. Hilariously, that's exactly what usually fails and makes the whole thing go to hell.

Once I got an adapter that just wouldn't charge the battery out of the box, and had to send it back and get a new one.

The most recent one I've had started making arc sounds shortly before it failed entirely.

I don't even talk to Dell Support any more since they are just consistently useless. I mean, the first time my hard drive went out, the guy tried to send me a replacement keyboard. I posted about that one.

More on the adapter problem:
getsatisfaction.com (where like half the threads at any given time are about this stupid Inspiron adapter)
someone who reverse-engineered it same as I did

Other problems I have had with this stupid computer:

• Hard drive failed twice — once about three months after I got it and again just under a year (apparently friends have had the same problem)
• Battery went to hell six months after I got it, received replacement battery under warranty, replacement battery almost immediately started causing "battery not recognized" messages and dropped to about 15 minutes on a full charge over the next couple months
• Hinges are breaking (I open and close the damn lid about twice a day. I'm not picking it up and swinging it around by the display. What the hell)
• From day one I have been unable to run any sort of game or anything on here because the CPU usage instantly goes to 100% and the fan runs as fast as it can until it overheats and shuts off. This is probably the most annoying thing. Happens when I run Flash stuff. Happens when I run SimTower, which dates to 1994 or something like that.
• Hard drive consistently runs way too hot (worth mentioning that the first one didn't do that though

I would actually tolerate this to some degree if Dell Support wasn't so useless and would just admit that their power supply is a giant piece of trash and do something about it for me, but no, that is too much to ask. Screw Dell.

I know people say "I'M NEVER BUYING FROM X AGAIN" all the time and don't mean it, but I have meant it every time I've ever said it about anything. If Dell cannot get their act together, they can join the ranks of Companies I Pretend Don't Exist.

Presented for your consideration, I have compiled a list of rhymes that are Considered Harmful, and will cause me to emit an involuntary loud "BUHHHHH" and mark your band down a few points in my internal spreadsheet.

• Fly/sky/high. Like all of Satan's snares, this rhyme is simple and obvious, a path of least resistance. I cannot count the number of times I've heard some generic clipart rock open with some douchebag singing "I WISH I COULD FLY / INTO THE SKY / SO VERY HIGH". Awesome, thanks for that surpassingly unoriginal expression of a desire all humankind has shared for centuries. Buy a goddamn JetBlue ticket and shut up.
• Friend/end. What end, anyway.
• Together/forever. Not likely -- word on the street has that your significant other is thinking of leaving you for someone who doesn't need to resort to cheap slant rhymes.
• Fire/desire. Betrays pyromaniac tendencies.
• This one's one of those idiosyncrasies in Christian music: word/Lord. I don't think you understand how this works. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that lyrics in contemporary Christian music are typically drawn from a very small pool of set phrases, resulting in most songs having nearly the exact same goddamn words.
• Nigga/trigga. Apparently rap songwriters frequently have need of a couplet that describes a black person using a firearm. They seem to have established a certain standardized way to construct such lyrics. They are proud of this elegant solution and trot it out as frequently as is remotely excusable. Addendum: I just remembered that Elvis Costello managed to pull this one, in "Oliver's Army".
• AB/B or anything similarly constructed. It is often tempting to say that someone's fall from grace was a source of disgrace, but this is prudently avoided.
• Anything/surrender. If you are thinking of rhyming "surrender", stop. It is mathematically impossible to come up with a non-stupid rhyme for "surrender". Also, if you are trying to rhyme "surrender", chances are you are in a nu-metal group -- disband it at once.

Bonus tips:

• The Black Eyed Peas' entire repertoire doubles as a sort of database of regrettable rhymes and is required listening for any aspiring songwriter. A friend whom I consulted on the topic of bad rhymes advised me of Black Eyed Peas single "Where Is the Love", a me-too "We Are the World"-style anthem from the school of thought that seeks to cure every social ill by writing an over-earnest pop song about it and hiring a celebrity to sing on it:

  But if you only have love for your own race
  Then you only leave space to discriminate
  And to discriminate only generates hate
  And when you hate, then you're bound to get irate

  I'm getting irate right now.
• The main hook line of your chorus should ideally not feature a glaring cringeworthy grammatical error. Extra prepositions shoehorned in to hit your syllable quota are particularly inexcusable.
• Never write this verse (courtesy of Slipknot's "Wait & Bleed", truly the spirit of a generation captured in one song if ever I have heard it):

  I wipe it off on a tile, the light is brighter this time
  Everything is 3D blasphemy
  My eyes are red and gold, the hair is standing straight up
  This is not the way I picture me

  If you believe you may have written this verse, contact a doctor right away.
• If you are a suburban white kid trying to write rap, please be careful that you do not mindlessly parrot things you heard in a Wu Tang track. There is a certain unfavorable irony to some goofy teenager obliviously rapping about the Nation of Gods and Earths because he thinks it sounds cool.
• Relatedly, refrain from trying to shoehorn as many Rap Words as you can think of into any rap or conversation about rap. "Spit", "real", the list goes on. It is painfully obvious that you are not comfortable with these terms. Also, if using them requires conscious effort on your part, your notion of what Rap Words are is probably preserved in amber from 1994.
• One of the best rhymes, courtesy of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "The Tears of a Clown" (a perennial favorite of mine):

  Now, if there's a smile on my face
  It's only there trying to fool the public
  But when it comes down to fooling you
  Now, honey, that's quite a different subject

  The cleverness of this wholly excuses the later "sad/sad/bad/glad".

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