My HP OfficeJet would like to talk to you. Basically, if it runs off of a USB port, it’ll work with Dell. We did get a free Dell printer with our last purchase, but it did not include the connection cord (and they tell you you have to order it separately, bleh).
IIRC, there was a lawsuit in California in which Dell was charged with ‘bait-and switch’ tactics, telling customers that the computer with the advertised low price was no longer available. It was a couple of months ago that I heard this.
I think the Dell prices are arguably not for real. I hear folks saying you pay more for this and that thing that you wish you could add, but - who would mail order a computer without having it shipped? That’s $100. And there’s a $75 rebate involved. So for the $300 PC I ordered a little while ago, they charge my VISA card $475. I think that makes it a $475 PC.
The rebates don’t have zero cost, so it’s not like you can consider the “after rebate” price as accurate. I spend about an hour looking around and calling Dell and messing with my supposed “online account” for which the password didn’t work anymore, while trying to get the $75 rebate. At this point I have spent more time than $75 is worth, so they win, I’m giving up. I think they must figure the percentages and use rebates as what might as well be a hidden cost.
It also is weird that you can’t turn down the speakers or the printer to save anything, because they’re “free”. Somehow, after dropping half a grand, I think they aren’t. It can’t help but increase the price to be shipping everybody printers and speakers they didn’t want. I have now several unopened in the basement.
And, yet, Dell still leads in reliability, and I don’t know of a competitor that doesn’t have all the rebate and free printer foolishness and has a record of good reliability and good prices. Though, I am looking - and the minute I find one they’re getting my business.
Totally untrue. Dell computers are set up with standard FireWire, USB, and parallel interfaces. I have an Epson printer/scanner, a Seagate external HD, and a bazillion other 3rd party peripherals hooked up to my Dell. They all work perfectly.
slickdealz and fatwallet are other really good sites for dell deals too. I know its not uncommon (although not daily either) to find a Dell 3000 with a P4 (instead of the celeron) and 15" LCD going for about $400 After rebates and with free shipping.
If you don’t mind turning some screws and plugging in some IDE cables, you can save big bucks buying a barebones system. Next week, we are buying my wife a computer that comes as case, integrated motherboard, power supply / fan, 1.6 GHz AMD Duron CPU, 512 MB DDR RAM, Maxtor 60 GB HD and a floppy drive, for $257. That’s moving up from the PII 266 Sony VAIO that cost $1500 new.
I don’t know why more people don’t buy these. They are so cheap and work so well.
What all do you need to add to a barebones system to get it working? Just monitor/mouse/keyboard/speakers or are there parts of the actual computer that you need to buy as well?
One other word of warning, for cheap computers (though I don’t know if Dell specifically does this). Often, on a cheap computer, many important bits of hardware are integrated onto the motherboard. This does allow some greater efficiency in production, and hence a lower price. And it works fine.
Until something breaks. Eventually, your sound card will burn out, or your modem, or your video card, or your USB ports, or something. And when it does, you probably will not be able to just buy a new part to replace that one. You’ll have to replace the entire motherboard, which (as you might expect) costs more than any one of those parts individually.
Again, I’m not saying this is true of Dell specifically (I haven’t bought a PC in years). And it might not be a dealbreaker, either: It might be two or three years before any such component fails, and maybe that’s all you expect from a computer. But it is certainly a question to ask and to consider.
If one includes the price of an operating system, it’s not as great a deal.
Those I know who have bought $299 Dell workstations on the phone have always spent much more for “upgrades.”
If one knows exactly what one needs and can resist the pricey upgrades, it may be cheaper to purchase online.
If Dell’s selling CD burners for $75, then that might be a clue as to how they make money on the $299 systems…
Dell makes a lot of money off of pre-installing software. No, they aren’t saving you money by installing all of this (pardon the POV) junk - they are making it. My dirt-cheap dell had the following programs pre-installed, which I promptly uninstalled:
[ul]
[li]3 America Online programs[/li][li]Dell Media somethingorother[/li][li]Dell Picture Studio[/li][li]Earthlink Setup Files[/li][li]“Get High Speed Internet!”[/li][li]H&R Block Tax Offer[/li][li]Jasc Paint Shop Pro Photo Album 5[/li][li]Jasc Paint Shop Pro Studio, Dell Edition[/li][li]Learn2 Player[/li][li]Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition Installer[/li][li]Microsoft Plus! Photo Story 2 LE[/li][li]Modem Helper[/li][li]MusicMatch for Windows Media Player[/li][li]MusicMatch JukeBox[/li][li]MyWay Search Assistant[/li][li]NetWaiting[/li][li]NetZeroInstallers[/li][li]RealPlayer Basic[/li][li]Sonic DLA[/li][li]Sonic RecordNow![/li][li]Sonic Update Manager[/li][li]ViewPoint Media Player[/li][li]WordPerfect Office 12[/li][/ul]
Not to say that I wasn’t a satisfied customer.
All you need to do is take out the drive(s) from your current computer and fasten them in the bays and connect the IDE and power cables, plug in your existing monitor and speakers, printer, scanner, mouse and keyboard. An integrated MB comes with sound and video. A non-integrated one means you put your own sound and video cards in the PCI slots. You then start it up and run the driver installation CD that comes with the barebones system. It’ll be the same system you had before, in a new machine. Same OS, same programs, everything. Just faster.
Yes, there is nothing wrong with their low end systems. They are just low end (but still cheaper than you could probably find elsewhere).
I just built my own computer for the first time ever. People who say that building your own is cheaper are generally full of it. I challenged people to put together a comparable machine as Dell sells standard, and they have been unable to do it (don’t forget, all that software you conveniently pirate . . . I mean don’t use . . . tends to come with the Dell, like XP and Word).
Where Dell does make cash are on upgrades like memory. They start you off with 256 or 512, and then charge roughly double what it costs to buy it yourself for upgrades. For example, for awhile, I thought about buying a Dell 9100 instead of building my own. One of the things that irked me, however, was that to get to 2 Gigs of RAM, Dell wanted an extra $400 (if I recall correctly). My 2 Gigs that I put in my homebuilt costs about $200 total (and that’s not considering that Dell is really charging you for 1.5 Gigs, as the you start with 512 or so.
More likely, you’ll be able to disable the onboard component, slap in card, usb or firewire device and carry on after spending a few minutes and $29.95 from Comp USA.
AFAIKT the Dell 3000 has a normal ATX format motherboard so a generic replacement should be possible. On the downside mine only has three slots and no AGP slot for a video card. I’m not a gamer so the integrated video has more than adequate performance for me as does the integrated sound.
I used to build all my own PCs and finally decided it wasn’t fun any more. Buying a Dell was ultimately cheaper but getting exactly what you want for a low price can be an exercise in frustration. Best deal I found was by waiting until they had almost exactly the configuration I wanted on sale and getting it with as few options as possible. I did find for example it was cheaper to decline the anvivirus and firewall software, install the demo versions and license them direct from that manufacturer. In short buying a Dell is kind of like shopping at Fry’s Electronics, you can get a great deal if you know exactly what you are looking for and don’t have to depend on a salesperson.
I have a Dell Dimension 2400 which I bought for a very fair price and also am getting fairly good customer service.
I agree with the above posts that Dell advertises low then tries to upsell you. The only thing that keeps this from being an illegal bait & switch is that if you insist, you can actually buy the advertised machine.
Before purchasing, I called Sales to get some information about the advertised machine. I asked about expansion slots. She asked me what I wanted expansion slots for; I said I wanted to install a FireWire card for video capture. She then said I would have to get a much more powerful machine for video editing, and recommended a machine that cost, oh, maybe twice as much. The funny is that I had been doing video capture and editing on my IBM Aptiva 300 MHz machine. (Turns out there are three slots but one is taken up by the OEM modem, or maybe it’s the Ethernet card, I can’t remember.)
This machine ships with a DVD, CD-RW, and hard drive. I called again to ask if it could accommodate a second hard drive. Admirably the sales people didn’t know but turned me over to tech support. Now, tech support is geared up to answer questions for owners, not pre-sales, so it was a little tricky to get to a human being. You normally enter your Service Tag to get to tech support. Anyway, I got the answer (the controller could handle another drive, the cable had a secondary plug on it, and there was an unused power plug, but no bracket to mount another drive. Don’t ask me why.).
I ordered online to avoid the sales pitch.
Two weeks ago, 21 months later, my hard drive failed. I purchased the machine with 3 years on-site warranty. They sent a local contractor to my house to install a new hard drive. So then I looked at upgrading. It turns out–this is utterly undocumented so there’s no way you could know this unless you knew to ask the question in advance–that the controller cannot handle a disk bigger than 120G. I learned this from a guy at CompUSA, and, skeptic that I am, called Dell to confirm, which they did.
(Post Script: The limit does not apply if you use an external drive connected by USB.)
As mentioned, you will almost certainly find that you will purchase add-ons beyond the advertised price. Unless you know something about computers, you may find out later that your machine is very limited in terms of potential upgrades. But you will get your money’s worth, Dell is aggressive about sales but not downright fraudulent.
Damn, Damn, Damn! I bookmarked your site earlier in the day but didn’t really peruse it very well. I just bought a Dell Inspiron 1200 Notebook on special promotion ($549 reduced from $649) not a half an hour ago for my Mom. She brought the flyer from the paper to me and asked if it was a good deal. Hell, I thought it was a great deal! 1.4 GHZ, 40gig, CD burner/DVD drive combo- can’t really do better than that (or so I thought). She said go ahead and purchase it it for her so she can have her own computer and out of convenience for when she goes to FL.
Ya see, what Dell doesn’t tell you in the add for the $549 notebook is that there is $50 shipping and handling and about $40 tax. So after the $100 automatic rebate the total is about $640, anyways. So what do I do? I order it tonight and only after do I go looking throught the deals on techbargains. Turns out I could have saved $40 and gotten a comparable but slightly better HP Compaq notebook for $599. It beats the Inspiron in it’s 15" screen as compared to a 14" and has integrated wireless, something my Mom was considering as an add on with the Dell.
I feel like I could have done better…I’m such a dipstick.
Just to clarify, the Compaq is a better deal because of free Shipping and handling, although I don’t know if tax is included in their advertised deal, so maybe I would have only saved $10 at the most. It still has better features, though.
When last I owned a PC, this was not an option. If it is now, then I retract my earlier comment.