<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 4:00 PM, James Crow <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:james@ultratans.com">james@ultratans.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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If you want a Dell without all the crap look at their Small/Medium Business website. I just checked and the option is there. Go to Dell.com->For Office->Workstation->Small & Medium Business. From there you can choose what OS. FreeDOS and Linux are both options as is Windows XP. The systems may cost more, but I think the components that go into the OptiPlex and Precision lines are better than those used in the Dimension and whatever else they sell to home users.<br>
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Cheers,<br><font color="#888888">
James</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
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_______________________________________________</div></div></blockquote><div><br>As someone who's used Dell's personal and enterprise lines and everything in between for over ten years, I figure I can add some value to the discussion. <br>
<br>The new Vostro line kind of muddles the water, but in general you have your business line (Lattitude, Precision, Inspiron and Poweredge non-SC) and your consumer line (Inspiron, Dimension, XPS) with the SMB line (Vostro, PowerEdge SC) filling the gap in between.<br>
<br>Business-class machines will have 1) Better support, 2) Much less shovelware pre-installed, 3) More hardware monitoring hooks for WMI / SNMP / IPMI etc, and will be less cutting-edge in terms of performance, to ensure a bit of reliability. <br>
<br>So the take-away is, Optiplexes and Latitudes usually cost more and are slightly less powerful than their consumer counterparts, but if you value reliability and support over bleeding-edge components, they are worth it.<br>
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