Well, not the whole company, but I have owned Dell Computer stock from time to time. Seems those days will always be a memory; Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell will be taking the multi-billion dollar company private according to the article linked below.

The first new PC I bought was a Dell 386. (I owned a used IBM PC before then.) I remember the day it came! A huge box! That was fun. Then I bought a Dell 360i Laptop, that I still have. I’m not sure if it works, though that may be a project for later today. I also bought Dell stock and rode it up for a nice run.

Back in the early 1990s I did some shilling for Dell. I attended “media training” for a spell, then they flew me to New York City for a media tour. I forget how many radio and TV shows I was on, pushing Dell’s Technology for Technophobes initiative. They wanted me to do more, but I declined.

My current gaming system is a Dell, albeit it’s probably the oldest PC in the office. I’m not sure what Dell’s move does financially, other than at one time, owning and profiting from Dell Computer stock was a fairly popular thing. Not so anymore.

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The Xbox 360 is going to be 8-years-old in November. Sony’s PS3 turns 7 that same month. In human years, that’s rather young, but in high tech years, those consoles are old men, well beyond retirement age. To put it another way, I don’t have any computer in my office that’s 7 years old, let alone 8.

So brace yourself! Coming later this year: The next round in the game console battles.

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Because my Mac runs OS X Snow Leopard, this trick doesn’t work. On newer Macs, however, it’s fatal when tried in any app. Very interesting!

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It’s a given when you purchase digital storage that the actual storage you get is a hair less than what’s advertised. So those 1TB hard drives may have about 960GB of actual storage — something like that. Or, as another example, that 32GB Android tablet you purchased may have about 28GB of storage available. For most folks, that’s understandable and acceptable. But the Windows Surface tablet, the one they sell advertised at 64GB of storage? It comes with only 23GB available.

23GB out of 64GB?

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Not only do they pay more for their phones, but the average monthly bills for iPhone owners are much, much higher than the average monthly bills for your typical Android phone owner. I’m not sure why, though I could probably fabricate some interesting explanations.

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I’ve tried to write about a few of these in the past, but this article puts it quite well. Common example: Why is the app that makes phone calls on your cell phone called a “Dialer”?

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