Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

OK, Connie has $2,200 to buy a machine and printer for work. That’s the standard budget over at Harberview. They are standardized on Dell Optiplex desktops and Latitude notebooks. Interesting to see Windows 2000, not XP is part of the standard too. I’m not used to paying so much for hardware, so this is a good way to compare values vs. DIY and the cost of enterprise level stuff.
* PCWorld.com – Dell Latitude D600. This is a midrange notebook that is available. About $1,600 for small business and home and about $1,800 for large enterprise. Another irony that big companies are really paying more for their hardware. The low-end is just filled with rebates. For instance the $1,600 machine includes a free printer, more memory etc. Of course, the enterprises have their own discount schedules from the web price. Last time I looked those were about 5% off.
* “PC World on the Dell Latitude X300”:http://pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,113341,00.asp. This is a 2.9 pound thin and light notebook that can also ahve an expansion chassis for carrying all those peripherals. Expensive, but a good choice if you work around a lot and sometime need some more peripherals. Of course now with USB 2.0, all the peripherals can hang (unneatly albeit) off of USB 2.0. A good configuration is about $1700.
* “Optiplex 270″:http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/hardware/desktops/0,39001723,39015761p,00.htm. This is the desktop machine from Dell. With a 19” LCD monitor, weighs in at $2,200 with a 2.8MHz Pentium and 512MB memory plus an 80GB hard drive (sure makes the Shuttles I’ve been building seem like nice buys if you can stand the risk, Connie’s dad machines cost about the same at $1,600 and had an Athlon 64 3400+, rocking fast ATI video card, 2GB of memory, a DVD+RW drive and 200GB disk or a 20% faster processor, 2x faster video, 4x the ram, 3x the disk).