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Dell, how far you have fallen. At one time you were the greatest thing to happen to the PC market. You sold low-cost, quality machines without any gimmicks like cow-spotted boxes. Dell was all business, with great service. Then the MBA's took over, or something. Your website became a terrible mess. You hid all your phone numbers. You transferred tech support to other countries where we now deal with terrible accents, are ignored, and have to follow hundreds of convoluted steps for the simplest of tasks. You guys can't even keep your website or phone numbers straight. I just called these two numbers at the bottom of this image, because I'm trying to RMA a monitor. They don't even go to Dell, they go to some scammy company who tells me "You've qualified for a free offer if you're 50 or older!" and then tried to sell me a $100 giftcard for just $1.99!  Let's not even talk about how I can't keep a sales rep for longer than 2 months because you guys move and shake your people around constantly, and after changing the name of our company contact every time I loving order, it never sticks so half of the time you're still looking for my predecessor who hasn't been here in five loving years! Look how grand you once were:  Now you are just poo poo.
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Jul 9, 2014 14:06
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We're switching over to Lenovo for all of the reasons you have mentioned and more. Their build times for laptops have become outrageous 6 week affairs. They manage to incorrectly bill us little piddily 2-3$ late charges a couple of times a month that we then have to call and fight to get refunded. If by some miracle you do get a good sales rep they're gone in a month or two. Current sales rep doesnt reply to any communication and his manager isnt much better. The only thing I will say for them is that their local sub contractor here gets warranty repairs done very quickly.
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Jul 9, 2014 14:34
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Didn't a lot of business migrate away from Dell in ~2008? My last employer did anyway. We moved to HP. I still have a soft spot for Dell chassis design (workstation/enterprise class anyway). I was just thinking about getting a top end Dell monitor but now I'm thinking about waiting for adaptive sync. Still haven't ruled them out yet though. I figure I'd have a better chance at getting a good panel if I bought a higher end display(?). Also not direct so I can deal with someone else if anything comes up.
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Jul 9, 2014 14:44
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It's hard to move away from them because they're so drat cheap and it's tough to get low-end stuff from HP or Lenovo, their sales sites/staff are terrible. Dell is great at getting you cheap machines but they suck at everything else. I hear you about the 6-week laptop builds, I think they do that on purpose so you'll pay extra for a 'hot and ready' configuration that they can ship out right away.
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Jul 9, 2014 14:54
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For all the Dell poo poo I own and have owned, I don't think I bought a single one new and direct except for a few monitors and laptop back in 2005/2006. I do remember calling them back in the day for their 35% off deals which you had to do over the phone and it wasn't all that fun. I'll stick with 3rd party new sales and off lease machines from shady guys in TX for now 
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Jul 9, 2014 14:59
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Haha I lease machines in TX The only dells I ever deal with run XP though because I guess this company hates them too. Funny the only Dell I've ever owned in my life is a $400 cheapo with an i5 and Windows 8 and I like it quite a bit. But that doesn't prove anything I know. I really don't care about laptops too much even though that's 97% of what I see for my job Dell makes respected monitors though its a shame to hear all this
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Jul 9, 2014 15:03
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My last 3 laptops have been Dells, and not cheap poo poo either, all Studio XPS. None have lasted longer than 24 months. I'm not especially rough with them either, they're just atrocious build quality. The third just died a week ago, the plastic keyboard ribbon cable socket on the motherboard turned into plastic dust. gently caress Dell.
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Jul 9, 2014 15:17
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Shaocaholica posted:I was just thinking about getting a top end Dell monitor Dell Ultrasharps still are fantastic monitors that are well worth their purchasing price. I have two of the current models sitting in front of me, on my desk - highly recommendable!
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Jul 9, 2014 15:21
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It just pisses me off that they can't look up the warranty status of a monitor by the loving serial number. They need the service tag of the PC it was sold with and the order number. Here's the guys response: "Robert we will need to have the order number of the monitor for security purposes of this unit as we have several device that was reported as lost unit"
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Jul 9, 2014 15:21
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Re: Pudgygiant Why do you keep buying? I hope their business class laptops are better. I'm pretty sure their consumer stuff including XPS has been meh for a long time. At least that's how I remember it even though I haven't followed dell in years.
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Jul 9, 2014 15:22
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Hm, maybe since my employer's pretty huge and throws lots of money at them, I've been pretty happy with Dell. I just use the chat technical support thing - I have never called - and do other things while they get my service order going.
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Jul 9, 2014 15:58
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My company is so big we actually have 3 full time on site HP techs who service our fleet of workstations and printers. It's wierd that our actual IT dept has no real reason to pop open cases and/or touch a screwdriver.
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Jul 9, 2014 16:14
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Shaocaholica posted:Re: Pudgygiant I was fairly sure contracting in the middle east was killing them, but either way I went a different direction with the new one and got an MSI Apache-60. No Day 1 HDMI white screen of death so far, so it's better than 2/3 of the Dell laptops.
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Jul 9, 2014 16:32
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:I just use the chat technical support thing - I have never called - and do other things while they get my service order going. quote:Agent (Clark Air BaseSMB US DIV_ Bria): "Thanks"
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Jul 9, 2014 16:33
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Bob Morales posted:Agent (Clark Air BaseSMB US DIV_ Bria): "Thanks" Why would you say this? Just say yeah, sure, or let's go with that. Unless your company has some obscenely strict inventorying and issue tracking.
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Jul 9, 2014 17:13
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Shaocaholica posted:For all the Dell poo poo I own and have owned, I don't think I bought a single one new and direct except for a few monitors and laptop back in 2005/2006. We use Dell Premier, and have never had an issue getting a quote made. Build time for desktops has been excellent, almost always less than a week and a half, laptops maybe a bit more. We use Latitude E6520s and Dell MPWs and have never had a custom build take more than two weeks.
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Jul 9, 2014 17:19
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Dell has been going downhill bad since the buyout was announced. They've reduced support staff, experienced sales staff are leaving, and build times are way up. We're a captive audience though, we've got 4000 users standardized on Dell workstations and laptops, and moving to a different brand is not cost effective really. We can only hope they get their crap together. The Latitudes are still solid notebooks though, so at least the business class hardware hasn't suffered yet.
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Jul 9, 2014 17:38
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Tytanium posted:We use Dell Premier, and have never had an issue getting a quote made. Build time for desktops has been excellent, almost always less than a week and a half, laptops maybe a bit more. We use Latitude E6520s and Dell MPWs and have never had a custom build take more than two weeks. We use Dell Premier as well. You must be one of the lucky ones with a good sales rep. 6 weeks to get a latitude 7440! And they manage to screw up our custom configurations in the premier site all the time which means we have to email our rep to get the site updated/fix which just adds to the build time.
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Jul 9, 2014 19:37
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Rep makes a difference, we had a complete shitheel who would screw up configurations constantly and ended up getting a new one about 5 months ago, he's much more responsive and has opened up free shipping for everything.
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Jul 9, 2014 21:54
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Have owned two dells. First was a desk top. Came with bad graphics card and had two wait for 3 weeks for a tech to replace it. They told me if I did it myself I would void the warranty. I also spent 6 hours with tech support (in India I think)to try and fix driver issues. Second was my wife's laptop. Never worked properly and I had to send it back. Ashamed to say I went with a Mac. Never had a problem. Fired it up and it wirelessly connected to my HP printer without even having to install the HP bloatware disk.
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Jul 10, 2014 03:59
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I went with a Dell laptop from their Vostro line back in ~2007 or so when I needed a laptop for college. It served me pretty well - it had a lot of processing power for its time and could play many games at full or near full graphics settings. But holy poo poo do Dell's power adapters and batteries suck! I had to replace the AC adapter twice in the past. If that laptop weren't so ancient, I'd have to replace the battery for a THIRD time. One time when the battery died, I had to basically run the thing on AC power only, just like a desktop. Now, I don't know if all Dells do this, but mine refused to run at full speed without the battery. Another time when the battery died, I was able to use my ex's Dell AC adapter from her Latitude to charge the battery on my laptop when it was shut down. Again, the system would throttle itself down to 800MHz from the 2.4GHz. Even changing the settings in the BIOS to override the throttling did nothing. So unless I ponied up for a fresh adapter and battery, the laptop would cripple itself. After working for a few companies that were Mac shops and handed out Macbooks to their employees, I ended up really liking the Mac OS. So to replace the Dell, I ended up going with a Macbook Pro. I just don't see any Windows based offerings that are attractive to me. Any time I roll through Best Buy to kill some time, all the laptops I see look like flimsy pieces of junk. Keyboards are stiff to type on, ergonomics looking like the thing will hurt my wrists after five minutes, etc.
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Jul 10, 2014 15:00
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I had a Dell Axim X30, it was nice.
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Jul 10, 2014 15:43
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Weener Beater posted:Ashamed to say I went with a Mac. Never had a problem. Fired it up and it wirelessly connected to my HP printer without even having to install the HP bloatware disk. Why would you be ashamed?
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Jul 10, 2014 16:10
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Dolemite posted:I went with a Dell laptop from their Vostro line back in ~2007 or so when I needed a laptop for college. It served me pretty well - it had a lot of processing power for its time and could play many games at full or near full graphics settings. That's why you're paying 3 times more for the same hardware inside.
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Jul 10, 2014 21:03
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Dolemite posted:After working for a few companies that were Mac shops and handed out Macbooks to their employees, I ended up really liking the Mac OS. So to replace the Dell, I ended up going with a Macbook Pro. I just don't see any Windows based offerings that are attractive to me. Any time I roll through Best Buy to kill some time, all the laptops I see look like flimsy pieces of junk. Keyboards are stiff to type on, ergonomics looking like the thing will hurt my wrists after five minutes, etc. That's because they are. They're consumer grade junk and they're built cheaply because people only want to pay ~$300.ish for a laptop. We buy the business class latitudes at work and they're pretty good. The AC adapters are still a weak point (at least in a healthcare environment where people aren't very careful with equipment), but overall they've been pretty solid.
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Jul 10, 2014 22:21
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You can't compare consumer grade poo poo to proper business class notebooks. Dell Latitude's, HP EliteBooks, Lenovo ThinkPad's are all in a different league than the consumer level offerings. The price difference on Apple products really isn't there anymore to be honest. 3 to 4 years ago there was a hefty difference between a similarly configured Dell Latitude and MacBook Pro. There really isn't much of a difference right now. For instance, I just bought a VP a new MacBook Air, i7, 8GB RAM, 512SSD, about 2000 dollars with AppleCare. My Dell E7240 with i7, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD and 3 year complete care warranty was about 1900 dollars with our Dell discount. I personally hate loving with Apple machines. My support options are drag my rear end to the mall and stand around for an hour or more, or mail it off and get it back who knows when. Dell has a guy at my door the next business day to fix my laptop on the spot.
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Jul 10, 2014 22:29
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Yeah, I mean you get what you pay for. If you don't do your homework and just buy the $300 junker special at Best Buy of course it's going to be a piece of trash. Macs are more expensive but usually work better out of the box for casual browsing and stuff 75% of people who have laptops use them for. I personally have a thinkpad and it's great for what I need it for. I believe my mom's heathcare uses Dells and they hate the drat things because of the durability.
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Jul 10, 2014 22:29
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Despite not being a fan myself, I have heard pretty great things about the non-consumer laptops. My coworker told me a story where his grandparents had a Basic (comes with the systems) Lattitude 5520 that got rained on and straight up ruined. Water and rain aren't covered. They were told it wasn't covered but they dispatched an onsite tech to look it over. The tech brought a new laptop and said "it didn't look like water damage to him." Course not all experiences are like that. Malek fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Jul 11, 2014 |
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Jul 10, 2014 22:54
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Years ago we bought a bunch of Latitude E5500s for our teachers at a couple different schools. They've run excellently, and they're aging much better than I would have expected. The only thing I don't like are the AC adapters. The DC plug is so drat long and the little blue light is an extremely common breakage point. I don't think we've had one die yet (meanwhile I've sent like 5 younger Lenovo laptops from mobile labs in for 'it doesn't turn on' and 'LCD works, but the backlight doesn't' fixes in 6 months). Had a hell of a time with our account rep, though. We had a decent enough one for the first year or so we had the E5500s, but then he stopped responding to emails and we eventually discovered he'd been replaced. Then the replacement stopped responding pretty quick, and of course she had been replaced too. That replacement actually contacted us to let us know they were our new rep. Lasted a few months. None of the replacements seemed to have our previous orders in their records; when I wanted more identically-configured E5500s, I had to forward the rep the original quote so he could configure the E5510s to be the same. Now we've standardized on Lenovo through a reseller and get our replacement Dell accessories through a different partner/reseller. gently caress "Dell" printers, though. Someone decided to buy a dozen of them early on and most had died within a year. Even the expensive color lasers. One of those needed its entire drum assembly replaced; it went to surplus instead. Less than a year old and very low volume (probably fewer than 1000 pages).
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Jul 12, 2014 08:17
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Dell servers and Storage own. You pay for the performance you want, and you get what you pay for. That's all.
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Jul 13, 2014 03:36
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Dell servers and Storage own. We've bought a few hundred recently and they were a disappointment compared to the equivalent HP. Service and support were terrible, sales people acted like they didn't even want our business, and iDRAC... When your product makes iLo look good you need to put more work into it. Once you get past all that (and RMAd the DOA parts) they're fine, but so is any other Intel based server. Dell used to be fantastic but I can only assume they've given up.
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Jul 13, 2014 05:24
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Their tech support can't even agree amongst themselves. I bought a laptop in the UK then moved to China for work. After owning it for 3 weeks it stopped turning on, but I was pretty happy when I contacted their live chat and they gave me a phone number for their local office who sent someone out to replace my motherboard. Fast forward a few months and now I'm having problems with the graphics card, now the tech support tells me the only way I can have it repaired is returning it to the UK. No matter how much I tell them they have repaired it before, that they have literally sent somebody to my house to fix it, they still assert they cannot do it. I can't even contact the local office directly, because they want the reference from the diagnosis before they'll do anything. 
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Jul 13, 2014 12:53
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Well, Michael Dell rebought out his own company and took Dell private again. That was at least a year ago. Is it overly hopeful to think he might turn them around given more time?
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Jul 13, 2014 13:11
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skipdogg posted:You can't compare consumer grade poo poo to proper business class notebooks. Dell Latitude's, HP EliteBooks, Lenovo ThinkPad's are all in a different league than the consumer level offerings. Indeed. The good ultrabooks and the macbook pros are very similarly priced now, and both have outstanding build quality.
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Jul 13, 2014 13:16
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Bob Morales posted:You hid all your phone numbers. Can I just say, gently caress people who do this. Your phone exists so I can contact you, and for no other reason, ditto your email. If you don't want to use them because you've got them set up on your end so they annoy you, that is so not my problem. Your webform is not an acceptable way of contacting you. I have no less then 5 different methods I regularly use to communicate, you must be using one of them. Do not make me jump through hoops to offer to give you money, I have crossed people off my purchasing lists for far less trivial things then simply being annoying to get hold of.
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Jul 13, 2014 15:18
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the last several servers I've purchased were from iXSystems because Dell can't build me what I need anyway. We just dropped  for VM servers that have 24 512GB Samsung 840 Pro SSDs each
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Jul 13, 2014 16:03
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Bob Morales posted:You guys can't even keep your website or phone numbers straight. I just called these two numbers at the bottom of this image, because I'm trying to RMA a monitor. They don't even go to Dell, they go to some scammy company who tells me "You've qualified for a free offer if you're 50 or older!" and then tried to sell me a $100 giftcard for just $1.99! Unless you relocated to Singapore, you're looking at the wrong phone numbers. US Tech Support and US Customer Service numbers are accessible within three clicks from the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of every page. Unless you're on one of the pages missing the footer links, or where the footer links return 404s, in which case begin your Choose Your Own Adventure over again until you find something intelligible. Godspeed. (I can only assume nobody in Round Rock is forced to use the Dell site.) Molten Llama fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Jul 13, 2014 |
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Jul 13, 2014 21:53
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Dell tech support was not particularly helpful fixing my XPS ultrabook when the base of the laptop cracked. It seemed as though approximately 80% of the staff was a 'floor manager' and that nothing could be done. Calling back several times in a row keeping track of the number of times my call was escalated to the next level and graphing things out on paper helped significantly in getting things resolved. The thing that finally worked was noticing that after 3 escalations I'd always get the same person regardless of who I originally started with, in addition to uploading a video to YouTube showing the damage was their fault. I suppose that can be chalked up as a social media win.
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Jul 13, 2014 22:06
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Ninja Rope posted:We've bought a few hundred recently and they were a disappointment compared to the equivalent HP. Service and support were terrible, sales people acted like they didn't even want our business, and iDRAC... When your product makes iLo look good you need to put more work into it. Once you get past all that (and RMAd the DOA parts) they're fine, but so is any other Intel based server. Out of curiosity, did you get Basic or ProSupport contracts on these? World of difference from my observations.
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Jul 13, 2014 22:59
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They use such lovely power supplies. They put in units that are just enough to for it to turn on and browse the internet and nothing more. This means that it's constantly under heavy load and they burn up in Optiplex 790 and 7010s. It does make for some spooked users, because these PSUs like to pop and let out the magic smoke.
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Jul 14, 2014 01:39
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