Doing the Dell thing.

My wife’s Dell Inspiron 6000 has been on the fritz lately, but then again it is a little over 3 years-old. The DVD/CD burner unit will no longer play CDs, much less burn anything. The system is having more frequent blue screen of death messages, but it is not like I can fdisk and start over since the CD player is not working. It has been a decent laptop. As documented here, Dell had to replace the keyboard and lcd/screen, power supply, and I am now on battery number two; typically stuff for a heavily used family computer.

Last weekend I ordered a Dell Inspiron 1525 (Pentium Dual Core T3200 2.0GHz 667Mhz, 1M L2 Cache) with minimal extras – 3MB memory, 250MB HDD, and 8X DVD+/-RW dual layer drive. I also had to pony up a little extra to get MS Office 2007 Home and Student Edition in order to get Word, Excel, and Outlook. This Inspiron 1525 has nice 15.4 ince WXGA LCD TrueLife (whatever that means) screen. I pretty much scrimped on everything, even opting to not include the $25 built-in 2.0 megapixel camera in order to keep thing puppy under $900 (including taxes and second day shipping).

Did I mention this Dell comes with Vista (SP1 Home Premium Edition)? I am not too excited about that, but I did not want to spend the extra $150 to go the XP route. Man, I hope Vista is not a total train wreck.

I really wanted to go with a Mac laptop, but for now, I figured it would be better to get my wife a decent computer for everyday use. One she could use for email, web surfing, and the like. I will also use it for budgets and web surfing, and maintaining this site. The Dell Inspiron 1525 seems like a decent deal, unless the Vista monstrosity requires more horse power. I could have gone with bigger and better for a few hundred dollars, but I really did not want to spend the extra cash right now.

The new laptop should be here Tuesday (maybe Wednesday). More to come later.

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2 thoughts on “Doing the Dell thing.”

  1. I see Dells and other PC laptops with 3 or 4 GB RAM for $500-600 at the chains.

    But netbooks are intriguing as second computers.

    My photo and media are growing so i am thinking iMac

  2. This Dell was just shy of $900 … but so far seems to be a good value for the money. I too am looking towards an iMac, but really want to just get a fill-in sub $1000 laptop for this purchase.

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