Dan,
Know about the battery recall. Dell's not the only guilty party in that
respect. Aren't Sony, Apple and HP/Compaq on the hook too?
Did not read the WSJ article on Dell screwing up XPS system orders. Wouldn't
surprise me. But wouldn't surprise me that other vendors make mistakes on
orders either, although, as stated, didn't read the WSJ article so I'm not
cognizant of the details.
I've got two personal Dell's at home and 8 work Dell's (provided by my
employer). They are, by and large, stable systems. Just got my daughter a
e1505 that she just absolutely loves and I got it for $700 with 1GB RAM, DVD
burner, decent shared video and an SD slot. It's a pretty kicking laptop for
$700.
I have an eMachines that I got for $400 on sale. Threw another $100 at it
and now I've got an AMD 2.2Ghz with 1GB RAM, 360GB's hd (2), DVD burner,
7-in-1 card reader for $500. Granted, I will have to get a video card if I
want to run Vista with Aero but it'll still be < $600 total. And... when I
got the eMachines, there were no Dell's available in that price range that
offered an additional slot for upgrading video.
Anyway... I'd be hard pressed to build my own PC for the same $$$. And I'd
have to do the work. I've looked at Shuttle's... but, shoot, they're what?
$250 just for the bare bones case? Don't think I could hit the $600 mark
there. Could be wrong, haven't looked into that much, but I do know that the
days when I wanted to spend hours with my head inside a case are long gone.
In fact, these days, you can rest assured that expletitives fly when I have
to break open one of my cases. ;-D
Lang