With free shipping, I should think Dell is
not making too much on these:
I bought a Dell Diminsion 2350 for a little
less than $500 from the Dell Outlet store.
...........................................
That is actually twice what a person needs
to pay to get into a very low-end machine:
You can get a bare-bones system with case,
mainboard, cpu, and even 128megs of memory
thrown in, for as low as $150. So if you're
willing to put your old HDD in there etc...
I didn't want to fart around building my own
machine or upgrading my current PII, and
I just sort of randomly set my price point at
$500 this time.
So...this machine came with Microsoft
Office Small Business and Windows XP home,
(most of the machines from the outlet store
come with a Wordperfect suite, but somebody
ordered the MS software then returned this unit).
Nothing fancy here--just onboard sound and
video (which shares main memory--I don't expect
to do any gaming here, I don't use the XBOX that
I have as it is...)
It has a Celeron CPU, which I assume is a stripped
down Pentium, but it runs at 2GHz, so that has to
be much faster than my old 233mhz. The 7200rpm 30Gig
drive is five times bigger than my current HDD,
and I assume much faster/greater throughput.
In that past 15 years or so I've been through a 386,
a 486, and a PII-233. Overall, the clones have
been fairly reliable, though seems like each
time I've slapped in a card, I've had problems.
Plug and play, ha, so they say.
I've have had stinky power supplies, one failed
entirely. And my cooling fans have all been rather
noisy. Hoping the Dell will run quiet and cool
and run for five years.
Dell Service--I was disappointed. After I snagged
my machine, the email confirmation showed a PC
with a smaller HDD and half the memory
of the one I thought I ordered. Second check,
I apparently did print off the wrong unit--user error.
Unfortunatly, the machine had already shipped and could
not be changed, whatever.
Memory is cheap, I can slap in more myself after the
warranty expires in a year. And maybe at that time
I'll add a cheap dedicated video and sound card just
for fun. |
