One of my customers was after this exact same laptop and were going to go to Dell. I explained that although buying it from Dell it was £179, that was plus VAT and delivery.

Anyway, after reading this article I told them to go to PCBuyIt.co.uk.

Not only did they save the £27, they also got it next day before 10am which I was very impressed with (especially considering when I've got stuff from Dell I've had to wait a week for it to arrive!)

I installed and configured the laptop for them. First impressions were that it's not a bad machine for the money. The screen is clear enough (looks to be like what I have in my Latitude D610, albeit widescreen). There's about 35GB free hard drive space on the C: drive, with a 10GB D: drive which I presume is the Vista setup files (although the laptop did come with a Vista Home Basic CD!).

My only issue with the laptop is that Vista runs like a slug on it. It's got about 768MB free memory (256MB looks to be used by the on board video card). So I advised that if it drives them mad they should stick in another gig of memory. I'm hoping that this will improve it a bit.

Not sure how it runs with Linux, I didn't have an Ubuntu CD handy although I'd bet it would be a damn sight quicker.

Anyway... for just under £250 it's a bargain. I'm off to rub it into a friend who went to Comet and paid £350 for a lower spec laptop.

Rob

A couple of months ago I was in Mall*Wart and using my acutely-sensitive spider-sense, I cleverly spotted a (huge pallet load of) Dell Inspiron 530 PC hidden (in the middle of the aisle) with a subtle (CLEARANCE!!) sign reading "$300 off - now $599.97." Package included a 22-inch LCD worth about $300 by itself. After I got it home, I checked the Dell.ca website to confirm and the equivalent package, differing ONLY in the CPU being 1.8 GHz vs 1.6 GHz, was $1018.


The warranty is still good, you just have to go to a dell web page to transfer the warranty to your name.

Ebay is another place to find new dells for cheap. I saved something around $200 when I found someone selling a new vostro 1500 on ebay last fall. 

The circumstances were different then... I'm Canadian and back in October our dollar came to be worth more than the US dollar, but Dell was really slow to make adjustments to their price to account for this, as most retailers were, so buying straight from their Canadian site was not a good option. So much for NAFTA.

Dells shipping charges are a complete rip off, they use it to make their goods look cheaper than other companies but it gets evened out by their super expensive shipping and add-ons. I ordered 3 laptops at once and had to pay £153 for postage!!!!!!

You can find a lot of coupon codes on the internet with 10% off or even 25% off.

I think you'll find that the laptop's warranty is regardless of where you buy it from, it's associated with the Service Tag. So if the laptop you bought from the other place had a Dell Service Tag (and I have yet to see a Dell that doesn't), then you can be pretty sure it has a warranty too.

Cheerio!

What pay Dell more money to get XP on it?

Some people must be off their rocker.

I'd phone up my Dell Rep and insist on a XP version and I know I'll not get charged extra for it.

I can't remember when I last paid any P+P when buying from Dell. 

And no, I don't buy loads of machines. :-)

Just tell them you're a business and pay via a credit card.

Don't buy a crappy Dell product in the first place.

I would rather pay the extra £27 and leave Dell to install XP at factory. This is is a free option and means that with 1gb of ram this would fly (and have less hassle than with the Vista option).

So, if you shop around you can save money? Who would have thought...