About To Order.

Hey all. Thanks to all the help I received in my previous thread I have decided on the Dell I am about to order (specs below). But before I acutally buy it I wanted to know if anyone can think of a compelling reason for me to wait? I read a lot about 40% coupons and other great deals and I dont want to miss out.

Currently I have the order setup through the Dell Employee and Affiliates Program which gives me 12% off, is there anything else i should be attempting to combine this with or is this as good as its going to get for now? I am willing to wait another month or so if its going to save me another 30%.

Also I currently have it priced with 2gigs of the DDR2 SDRAM. (This is +$225 from the 1 gig option) Is it worthwhile to order it with 1 gig and buy another gig else where? Will it save me any money?

Lastly, are there other laptops in this catagory that I should look at? I looked at IBM, Toshiba, and a few others but none seemed to be able to match the 7800 video card with the 17in screen. I am a developer for an MMORPG video game which is pretty hungry for a powerful machine, and it will be the primary application that I am using this machine for so it needs to be pretty beefy.

Specs / Price:

Code:

Module   	  Description   	Show Details
XPS M170 	Intel® Pentium® M Processor 760 (2 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB)
Operating System (Office software not included) 	Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005
LCD Panel 	17 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen UXGA Display with TrueLife™
Memory 	2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz 2 Dimm
Video Card 	256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ Go 7800 GTX
Hard Drive 	100GB 7200rpm Hard Drive
Power Adapter 	Spare AC adapter - 130w
Network Card 	Integrated 1 Gigabit Network Card and Modem
Adobe Software 	Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 6.0
CD ROM/DVD ROM 	Featured Upgd-8xCD/DVD burner(DVD+/-RW)w/dble-layer DVD+R write capability
Wireless Personal Networking Card 	Intel® PRO 2915 and Dell 350 Bluetooth Internal Wireless Cards
Office Productivity Software (Pre-Installed) 	No productivity suite- Corel WordPerfect word processor
Anti-Virus/Security Suite (Pre-installed) 	I chose McAfee included with the Starter, Silver, Gold or Platinum Package.
Primary Battery 	9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery (80 WHr)
Hardware Warranty 	4Yr LtdWarr, At-Home,CompleteCare,30Day DOC,PC Training, 2Yr AntivirusSuite
XPS Specialized Support 	Inspiron XPS, Specialized Support
Dial-Up Internet Access 	6 Months of America Online Membership Included
Additional Batteries 	9-cell Lithium Ion Additional Battery (80 WHr)
Dell Digital Entertainment 	No preinstalled software

Sub Total: $3,917.00   	 
              -$470.04
Total:       $3,446.96 + S/H + Tax

 

Best machine you can buy imo especially for the money (if you could afford lets say a 6k dollar falcon nw or other boutique rig I might recommend one of those)

The dell is the best bang for your buck and **** good machine to! I want one-probably going to be my next machine

 

Hey If your going to spend 3k+ on a notebook you probably aren’t concerned about saving money. But your getting 2GB's of RAM. I would recommend getting the minimum then upgrading it after market from newegg. How much does it cost to upgrade to 2GB's? Newegg has 1GB of DDRII 533 notebook ram for $61. So $61x2 = $122. It costs $225 to upgrade from 1GB to 2GB's from dell. You would not only be saving $100 also have 2 spare 512 sticks to sell. Another trick to save you another $100 is to sign up for a fatwallet account. www.fatwallet.com then click the dell link from there and save 3% off your purchase. Or if you want to really save more money check dell outlet. I saw one today with the same exact specs that you have up there except a 80GB 7200 instead of a 100GB 7200 and it was only $2500. But then the 4 year service warranty would be an extra $350?

 

DO NOT spend $3,500 on a Dell. Look at the top of the line Acer's, Fujitsu's and maybe build one at Sagernotebook.com

Dell makes good laptops for about $1,400 and $1,800 for their XPS models, but any more then that, you are getting ripped.

 

3.5k is a lot to spend on a laptop. I would also check on some laptops made by Asus. But Sager has the NP5720-C and that has the Geforce 7800 also. You can get it for under 1k less with the same specs as you have up there ^. Compusa also has a really nice laptop. An acer take a look its a crazy price.

http://www.compusa.com/products/pro...code=336978&cm_ite=Aspire+AS5672WLMi+Notebook

 

if your spending that much, get a sager. Asus and quanta have nice ones, but sager is the way to go if you can afford it

 

Does this 3% add to the 12% I get from the Employee / Aff program?

Edit:
I am taking a look at the Acers now as well, but part of my decision is that I have owned about 4 Dell Laptops through the years and have always received excellent service whenever anything went wrong. This particular package has what looks to be an excellent 4yr warranty plan (and special ++ XPS service for whatever that is worth), does Acer have something similar?

 

I believe that stacks with most other offers. Just try if in Dell check out, you should have no problems if it works there!

 

Why not go for a custom built desktop? You can get a really fast system for that modey although it's not portable.

 

I have plenty of desktops as well of this caliber and better. I just wanted a new notebook that I can do some work on from the bed/couch/etc. My old 8200 just does not cut it anymore.

Update: I look at the Acers, Asus, and a few others that were suggested here and couldn't find anything with a screen this large and this much performance so I went ahead and droped the ram to 1gig (ordered up 2 gigs from newegg) and placed my order (came out to $3514 shipped). I was less than pleased with the dell sales person's knowledge of the product but eh what can you do, hopefully if i need support it will be better.

They claim I will receive the system by Feb 22, so when that happens I will let you guys know how I like it. P.S. the first thing I plan to do is wipe the drives (I just dont trust pre installed stuff) and do a clean install of XP pro, are there any pitfalls (spooky driver wise) that I should look out for (yes I did read the FAW btw).

Thanks again for all the quick replies,
~Nandy

 

Wow... congrats on your purchase.... Hope you like it!

 

Hehe. Thanks, me too.