Dell Product Lines

Dell's Dynamite Deals. Or Not.

Dell's main distinction is a total mix-and-match approach to thing — you can take almost any product they sell, and add or swap almost anything that will fit into the box, thanks to Dell's advanced inventory and on-demand assembly system, built up over the past 20 years. Rivals, by contrast, tend to encourage buyers to pick from among a series of more or less fixed configurations to control their costs.

The main downside mix-and-match is the breathtaking markups you often run into when you do that mixing and matching. You quickly figure out that those Dell ads trumpeting "from only $XXX!" are like the base price for automobiles — you won't pay anything near that little. Dell deals come with an insufficient 256 megs of RAM and paltry 40-gig hard drives and no monitors. Upgrade to a usable system and you've quickly doubled the price. "Oh, you wanted wheels with that?"

So get used to the fact that, for your corporate desktop system, whether from Dell or from anybody else, you'll be paying close to $1,000, and blaring advertising to the contrary won't change that.

One area where you can often get a good deal from these vendors is in the bundled software. Microsoft Office suite can cost half of retail, for example. So that's something to consider when you're configuring your next system.