That’s the bottom-end Dell PC that just arrived today. It’s a bit big, but I like the hardware design. I haven’t fired it up yet or anything, but I assume things will work ok. That’s a lot of hardware for a mere $379! Gotta’ love Dell and their promotions. I just wished I could have ordered it without any operating system and saved even more money. That seems to be a popular idea over at Dell’s Ideastorm, even if it’s mostly Linux geeks voting. 😉
In other Dell news I spent 63 (!!!) minutes on the phone with a helpful customer service gentleman named Lorne. I told him my sordid tale of woe and he said that my case was exceptional enough to warrant a replacement of the monitor even though it only had one stuck pixel. I won’t know for sure until tomorrow, because he had to escalate it, but he seemed quite confident that they’d send me out a new monitor. Sweet. We’ll see what happens…
I just ordered and received a Dimension e520n, which is a version of the e520 without an operating system installed (Dell included FreeDOS on a disk). Dell does offer an e521n as well.
Hmm. Interesting. When I ordered this machine there was no option for “No OS”. Dell isn’t very consistent unfortunately….
I believe you can only do the no OS thing over the phone and it actually costs you more money because without an OS they can’t load up all the craplets that subsidize the cost of the PC.
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/12505
Fascinating stuff…thanks for the link Oilman. It’s all starting to make sense – although you’d think that it would still be a LITTLE less because surely the $$$ Dell gets paid to install the crapware is less than what they pay for Vista….it HAS to be….doesn’t it? Yet this math doesn’t seem to support that.
You have to go to a specific part of the site to get them. They aren’t options on existing models, per se, but rather separate modeles (which is why the have the N-Series designator). The are listed in the drop down menus under “Desktops” in the home and small business sections as “Open Source Desktops”.
And my computer was cheaper than the regular e520 by $30.00.