Brief history. Dell was originally formed as "PC's Limited" in 1984 by Michael Dell, a college dropout who started selling built-to-order IBM Compatibles from his Dorm Room in Houston. After a few early years struggling and getting the gist of it, Dell eventually started to come into their own, eventually re-branding as Dell by about 1987 or 1988. During the 1990's, Dell started to get a little more foothold in the education and business sectors but was still beign largely outshined by IBM and Gateway (2000). It wasn't until Gateway was sold only overseas, and IBM Sold their PC division off that Dell started to take off as the Enterprise asset of choice. This was around 2004-2005. Since then, Dell has EXPLODED in popularity.

Inspiron - These are the "consumer passenger car" version of Dell's laptops. Mostly plastic, fairly well built, can be a little fickle here and there about certain things, but pretty solid overall. That said, they are not that consistant. I bought a new one for the wife in 2013 and it lasted until the warranty ran out on it. But I've seen others that just keep on running even though they look like someone took it for a trip in a dryer in the back of a truck on a old gravel road doing 60mph, and more stickers than Billy Joe Armstrong's blue guitar to cover the damage.

OptiPlex - The OptiPlex series is Dell's standard office desktop line for Enterprise and Small Business. Basically, it's a series of workstations available in Desktop and Tower format depending on configuration, intended for your average office worker to use. They're very solid, and very reliable, and have come a long way from the notorious capacitor failures of the early-mid 2000s. The newer ones are not nearly as expandable as the older units are, especially those new Micro-Form-Factor models that modern business likes because it keeps people, including us crazy IT people, from creating our own "Last V8" Version of the OptiPlex (something some of us are prone to do). The best OptiPlex's I ever encountered are the....this is cool....so Dell made codenames for their chassis in the 2000's and early 2010s. The best models were ones like the GX620 - aka hte "Matrix Chassis" dells named after various Matrix characters like Neo, and Morpheus, and the, god I love this one, "Hair Bands" chassis....ie I have worked on dells with things like "MOtley Crue" "Great White" "Def Leppard" listed on the bloody chassis - this is RAD. And the 7010 is the KING of those models, 80's styled, built like a tank, and they won't die. You just keep throwing crap at em' and they keep on going like the year is irrelevant. And they kept it up with the new ones too, which I mostly have only worked on MFFs (Micro FOrm Factor) models. The thing is, those suck from an "Expansion" Standpoint as there are no PCI-E slots in them, but they probably will make some nice micro-form-factor Linux clients when they start to be sent to the 3rd hand market. Just remember, if you get a 7050 or 7060 off e-bay or wherever, be ready to yank that blood Optane crap. Dell went HARD on that for a period of 2018-2022 and on 4GB of RAM it's just not worth the time. Yank that crap and throw a real m2 SSD in there and you'll have a good, cheap screamer once those get a little older.

Latitude - Dell's Laptop Line. Most of these are pretty darned solid. There is some junk here and here (mostly some of the 5000 series models), but most of them are pretty killer. Probably the most famous to me as an I.T. guy is the unkillable Latitude E-series stuff (except the 5400 and 5300). I've had - at work - several of these, and had many second hand E-series models as well over the years personally both bought and given, and these beasts are freakin' bullet-proof. Actually, I'm typing on an E6440 right now that's 10 years old, the darned thing runs frickin' POOLS - some graphics heavy new game released in 2024 for petes sake. Seriously, if you want a good, general purpose laptop that's a good LInux candidate, get an old E-series of 7000 series Latitude, they're cheap, their plentiful, they're reliable, they are very easy to get parts for, and they refuse to die. I will swear by em' till I Don't. My favorites of this series are the D630, E6400, E6410, E6440, E6520, E7x40/50/60, and the 7x80/90 post-E series models. My only gripe with the modern ones is that damn USB-C docking port gets broken all the darned time, and can be a little cantankerous if you don't run Dell Command Update with any normalcy.

Precision - The Precision series is Dell's long-running high-end workstation line that includes desktops and laptops. The Precision series is marked by a lot of devices with six-eight core i7 CPUs, lots of RAM (32GB or more in some cases), huge Drives, the laptops SUCK for battery life, but that's the point, they're a DESKTOP REPLACEMENT not a "Road Warrior". They sort of follow the trope of "the more bells and whistles, the more shit to break". The point of the desktops is a high end, high powered workstation for the kinds of high level developer, engineer, STEM field stuff you go to eight years of college for. The point of the laptops is to be able to (tolerably) do that on the road. They too are pretty durable but not as much I've found as the Latitudes are. The towers are frickin' tanks, almost as solid as an old IBM PC or XT product. That's about as close to an O.G. IBM PC AT 286 you'll find in build quality in 2024. But that's also why they are $3000+ brand new.

PowerEdge - These are their Enterprise Server brand. So you probably won't encounter them. I got lucky to meet a dev who was getting rid of his who gave me mine, and I already had parts from other friends in the industry I knew to really soup it up with. Basically, PowerEdge is the stuff your Network ADmin is remoting into and looking at all the darned time. We might talk about Servers a LITTLE bit on this page, as it might help people getting into the middle-upper echelons of I.T. or who have some 15 year old dilapidated Dual Xeon nightmare they want to put to work. The thing about Servers, is they are not like regular PCs. YOu enter a whole world of "Deployment CAB Files", "Headless Operation", SSH, Telnet, VNC, file perms, firewalls, and workign with the iDRAC (Dell's remote server management interface via the 2nd ethernet port).