TG: Programming: Dell Inspiron 15, 3000 Series

Home - Programming - Dell Inspiron 15, 3000 Series

DO NOT BUY THE DELL INSPIRON 15, 3000 SERIES.

No, this doesn't have anything to do with programming, but I'm so pissed off right now I could throw this brand new laptop right out the window. But then, that money would be completely wasted, and I'm going to hold out hope that Costco will take this hunk of junk back.

I have killed about an hour now trying to get Google Drive to install on this machine. I have it on every other device in the house except those with Windows 8. Windows 8 is clearly doing something to defeat the installer. It was doing something similar when I tried to install Chrome, but Google has gotten wise to this and provided a couple of different installers to try. So now I've got Chrome on the laptop and gotten rid of Internet Explorer.

But I still can't get drive installed. The error message reads, "Unable to connect to the Internet. If you use a firewall, please whitelist GoogleUpdate.exe."

So I tried that. And then I tried disabling the firewall entirely, but I still get that message, so it's clearly not the firewall. I've also gotten variations of the message that include "403 forbidden". Now, I've been a programmer for nearly 30 years, and I've written several web application frameworks, so I'm quite familiar with networks in general, HTTP error codes like 403, and Windows' love/hate relationship with all things Internet, and I can tell you with certainty that this isn't a Google server problem. The problem lies somewhere in Microsoft Windows 8.1 or Dell's junkware, pure and simple.

And since I can't pinpoint for sure yet which is at fault, my advice is to avoid the Dell 15 Inspiron at all costs.