Exhibit A

A 24mb File Download from from support.dell.com (transfer rate of 21.7k)

Exhibit B

A 22mb Download from ATI.com (transfer rate of 461k)

These screen shots were taken moments apart on the same machine on the same connection to prove its not my ISP throttling my downloads.

Dell Needs to consider hosting their support files on a CDN (content delivery network).

Slow downloads becomes a real world annoyance, take yesterday  I had to reformat a couple of Dell computers.

This is a fairly typical job for me. I reload Windows and visit the Dell Support site for the latest drivers. (Good best practice). This involves typically a 50mb to 75mb download depending on the machine.

Due to slow downloads speeds from Dell this added the best part of an hour to this task which kept a user offline longer that was needed.

So as you can see the speed you can access these support files is also very important.

Dell need to improve on this area, clearly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 8:42 am and is filed under Consumer Issues, DELL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.