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Dell Inspiron 3655 - Avoid This Computer

Cheerful Charlie

Cheerful Charlie

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Joined
Nov 10, 2005
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Houston, Texas
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My brother bought a Dell Inspiron 3655. It come loaded with Windows 10. But what if you want to load Linux? The BIOS is impossibly unintuitive and utterly Windows Centric. OK. Uhmmmm. No manual in the box. So let's go online and get the manual to figure out the BIOS and details. But no! No such manual! Damnedest thing I have seen in awhile. For the nonce he will run Windows 10. But the utter lack of any manual telling one what you have and how it is set up makes for a very bad user experience.

EFI? UEFI? Secure Boot? How do you load from a DVD or USB device? No manual! No clues for you sucker!

At any rate, I suggest avoiding Dell like the plague unless you have hours and hours to search help forums and have a high tolerance for frustration and computer manufacturer stupidity. And I thought HP was bad.

You have been warned!
 
Yeah. We got this far, but this is the BIOS that has no information once we get there to use it in a meaningful manner. It seems to assume you will be using Windows and nothing else. Not knowing how they have set up this machine, it is not useful. Information black hole.
It uses a Phoenix BIOS. There seems to be no fine control, little room for the usual set up as per the boot sequence of hard disks, USB, et al. Not that I could find. There might be something like that in there but with no manual to guide me, I haven't the faintest idea how to do such things. It seems to possibly be set up for a secure boot environment that limits options.

The utter lack of any real BIOS manual is a show stopper. This might all be fine for an office where you don't want some secretary to fool around with the system, or to keep some 13 year old genius from screwing up Daddy's system, but for the rest of us, it sucks.

The link you gave simply tells one how to access the BIOS and nothing more. Perhaps there is a manual somewhere that tells how to understand and use the BIOS, but their site does not offer a clue that exists or how to get it. I do not like Dell's customer experience philosophy at all.
 
I thought Windows 10 was going to make Linux stuff much harder.
 
Utter lack of even an attempt to documents Dell's BIOS makes it a giant pain in the ass for everything, including Windows. I do not know if Phoenix BIOS's are all Windows 10 centric now, but in the future I will avoid them. Before I would buy any system, I would go online and see if there is a decent BIOS manual available. If not, I will pass on that. No Dell for me. I usually build my own systems, and my present Gigabyte motherboard has a very comprehensive manual that fully explains their AMI BIOS. There are ways to deal with the BIOS from within Windows 10, but Dell in their wisdom, does not tell you that. For most modern Linux and BSD systems, UEFI is not a problem. But a system that is locked down, obviously with a locked boot loader and no BIOS manual at all is Dilbertesque.

Dell has definitely jumped the shark.
 
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