Dell is having some really-really sweet special prices for machines currently, 25% off of all their Home-based machines. The ones that caught my eye are:

1. Inspiron 1000 or the Inspiron 1150 (laptops) $598/$679

This is a pretty good laptop (just a bit heavy), and it’s the cheapest in the market today for what it does. However, I *think* that the 1150 is the model that has the trouble with XP SP2 where SP2 f*cks up some CPU detection and it degrades performance down to 300 Mhz effectively. Dell has posted a patch, but it’s always better to get the real update from Microsoft so future upgrades won’t break again… 😮

2. Dimension 2400 (desktop) $348

I am seriously thinking of buying this one. You see, I STILL run winXP Pro on my dual Celeron 533 system with only 256 MB of RAM! I have that dual Celeron machine since early 2000. It’s too old now… XP runs just fine of course, but I can’t do much with it really other than some email and browsing. I think it’s time for me to upgrade my main machine with XP…