I like that phrase. Presumably it means "a team that has been smoking a lot of crack".

I'm thinking Dell staff have spent too much time reading the BOfH stories on The Register. Did Michael Dell happen to give any tips on how to dispose of management staff who might oppose new purchases during this presentation? Maybe there were some Dell staff waiting outside by a white van with a roll of carpet and a shovel...

...if I were Michael Dell, I'd shut Dell down and give the money back to the shareholders,

Okay, okay, my coat's over there, under the carcass of the Power Macintosh 8100.

The Pope is Catholic, bears shit in the woods.......

This article talks about salesmen getting pistol-whipped like it's a bad thing.

I think the "crack-team" is related to the "butt happy" in some way that I'm not sure I want to try explaining.

@breakfast - thanks...my monitor needed a good cleaning!

They laid off Joe's bud in India, the one that codes the checkout, which is why when I tried to buy Dell products MikeyD wouldn't take my money. His demon checkout SAID I bought stacks of kit complete with delivery date, but lied and canceled the order and Dell could care less about it.

Everyone was very polite but totally unrepentant, somehow the assault by the demon checkout was my fault and please pay a higher price now if you want our wonderful products. I will say that the chat people were very nice, but MikeyD would never give them any power to correct the situation. The phone people just (politely) passed the buck. Whiny emails lobbed at customer service were ignored.

Some of the Dell products are pretty good, but I can live with 3 year old components plus some PCs from a competitor with a working checkout system. It astounds me that Dell would not re-instate an order placed in good faith that was bollixed by poor nearly untested code in their checkout [well, I presume it was untested. If it was working as designed maybe the title should be "Q4 Bankruptcy"]

Now you know where Dell wielded the axe to lay off people.

Q? 4? Profit? What? Q? 4? Profit?

Perhaps Ted has realised that before passing comment on other people's sales flannel, he himself might need a better model than selling el reg articles based on their swear-box-value.

Mines' the one shipped to me by Walsh Western.

(International Readers. If you haven't bought from Dell in the UK, apologies that this joke didn't work)

Unles Dell cuts out their techsupport altogether, starts stealing components and Vista copies, and then sells the resulting hunks of junk to unsuspecting consumers and idiots in the business who couldn't possibly care less about their staff, i'd say there's no way in hell they'll have any profit.

(Pirate, because the only way i'd be caught dead with a Dell was by stealing one, Arrr !)

Most companies have Windoze skills inhouse already, so the admin skills are already there for a Windows Dell box, and many will have Linux skills already too. Dell runs Windoze best and they're only second to HP on Linux. You're all obviously not in the IT industry or you would realize this. You're all just a bunch of Dell Haters, or you would understand.

Was about as rubbish and boring as the presentation apparently was.

Poor attempt at FOTW sir. Now, you know what you've done wrong. Please compose yourself and try again.

I thought this was going to be an article on all the bundled software that comes with a Dell that harrasses you over the first 30 days of use and makes your life a misery and confuses the hell out of the average numbty.

I do wish they wouldnt subsidise the cost of their PC's by filling them with crap.

Hang on,

To begin with, anyone who stole a laptop can't log into it without a password, so any laptop thief with a brain would wipe the drive, install a fresh hacked copy of Windows, and therefore no Dell phone home software would be on the HDD to phone home or alert the authorities. Didn't think of that didja, Mikey Dell? BLAH. Dell sux!!!

"The Pope is Catholic, bears shit in the woods......." I am sure that the Pope has never borne s**t in the woods, as you imply. In fact, I doubt if he's ever been near to any woods since his election.

The "I'm stolen" code is supposed to be in the laptop's BIOS, can't be easily erased and may still work if the HDD has been erased. If, however, Dell took shortcuts then all bets are off.