256 of ram? That is not that good, 60gb harddrive? That would fill up in notime, 3GHz processor? Well, can't say much, but it was probably a celleron.

Along with that, most of the hardware is probably crappy. I bet the ram is pc2100, which is the slowest DDR. The harddrive probably only has a 2mb cache. The processor probably has only 256kb of L2 cache. All of these factors make for a very slow computer, even if the big numbers sound empressive.

Well, if you have an on board graphics card, they could have allocated 256MB to it, rather than leaving it for your computer. This would have been a stupid thing to do, but very possible. There are ways to check it, and change it, but I am not sure what they are.

I will disagree with you about Celerons. They are very slow, dispite the clock speed. Most people who have to deal with Celeron processors just think their computer is broken or junk when it runs so slow. You would be amazed at the speed difference, and the price different now-days is only a few bucks. The FSB is up to standard, but that doesn't mean the system is running at that. The processor, ram, and mother board must all be capable of running at 533 for it to run that fast. I am sure the ram doesn't run that fast, and there is a good chance that the mobo doesn't as well.

256MB is not enough. Imagin having Word, Excel, IE, Thunderbird(Or outlook), and a good few programs running in the system tray. This would fill up that 256 really fast. Infact, I normally run about 300MB in ram at any given moment, even when not running much at all. 512MB is the bare minimum that I will put into a PC, it doesn't matter who I am building it for. Along with that, Dell normally comes with so much junk on it(As do most retail PCs) that it fills up that 256MB on startup.

256MB would be fine on a win98 machine, but XP just needs more, it takes more to begin with. At my work, all the machines are running at least 1GB of RAM and no less that 30GB harddrives. Even the 30GB get filled up rather fast, and we arn't putting random crap on there.

I currently have 300GB worth of hard-drive space, and have almost 200GB of it full. Granted, about 50GB is backups, and another 50GB is probably movies and games that I don't need to keep on hand. But that still leaves me with 100GB of meaningful data. It is not that hard to get that, just try playing a few games, keeping them there, and see if that 40GB doesn't fill up in a flash.

Hell, my old machine had a 40GB, it didn't play games, and I had that thing slap full all the time.

Once again, my point is, you spend $300 on a computer, you are getting $300 worth of computer.

Alright, you spend $300 and you're getting $300 worth of computer, but that is true anywhere. And again I say, they're throwing in XP Pro.

I've not seen any other namebrand computer offer deals as good as Dell, and with only $300 to spend, it's almost better to take a Dell over a build your own. For people with little to no technical knowledge, definitely. Even for me, if I couldn't have gotten XP Pro, ya know, the way I did, a Dell would've been the way to go.

There are also sites that will build your PC from the ground up that offer fair prices.

Airjoe, check both your pagefiling and your actual ram usage, there is a good chance that most of the data is stored on your harddrive, waiting to be put back into ram. I currently have FireFox, ThunderBird, Explorer, BYOND, Teamspeak, and Google Talk activly running, and I am using 400MB of ram and 400MB of pagefile.

I don't disagree with you that it is true anywhere, but you can get a $300 computer from most companys(At least some of the time). Even at a reduced price, putting hardware of any quality will at least run you about $250-$300, then you add in $50-70 for monitor, and $20 for mouse and keyboard, that puts you at almost $400, at reduced price hardware, for a PC that is worth it's price.

But we are arguing over apples and oranges here. My computer is on a different level than what dell sells, even if you spend more. My though is that a $300 computer is going to run like crap. I have seen many of them, and each time they ran like crap. My old VAIO runs way better than most current retail computers, and it has a 1.4GHz P4 in it with 384MB of ram. The difference? Better hardware and small numbers. L2 cache is one of the most important parts of a Intel processor, at this time, more important than the clock speed.

It cost dell money doesn't it? That was my point, it is cost to them aswell. Short of cutting corners, I don't see how it is possible to offer a computer with mouse and keyboard for under $400, and even at $400, you are stretching yourself thin. I can make a good machine for about $450 for just the tower, but winXP brings the price up to $550, but dell probably gets winXP for about $20, rather than $100.

I still don't like dell. Even after your guy's arguments.

Although, I must say this.

I bought my dell, which is a Demension 2400 about 4 years ago. Back then they were roughly around the price of $800.00

Now, they're only like $299.00, which sucks, I know. BUT, I must say.

Three of my friends bought newer, higher powered dells, and spent about, eh, $500 on them I'd say, and even though theirs are said to run way better, even when they were bran spankin' new without any pornography on it or anything. Mine still ran/runs 5x faster than theres.

Mine has had trouble's, yet, it's still faster than anyone else's around.

Bwahahaha. =D

Maybe dell put the wrong memory crap inside mine by a 1 in a million freak accident? Yay! =P