My Dell Has Shipped From Ireland

[Andy Sjostrom]

http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/offers/specials_m_dimen8250.htm

While on the subject... According to the tracking document I can expect an Estimated Time of Arrival the 25th of November. My Dell comes in 5 packages and weighs about 54 kg (119 Lbs). With 2530 MHz, 512 MB, 120 GB, DVD+RW, and GeForce4 I guess you realize that despite it isn't a Pocket PC, I am one happy dude anyway!

[Andy Sjostrom]

http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/offers/specials_m_dimen8250.htm

While on the subject... According to the tracking document I can expect an Estimated Time of Arrival the 25th of November. My Dell comes in 5 packages and weighs about 54 kg (119 Lbs). With 2530 MHz, 512 MB, 120 GB, DVD+RW, and GeForce4 I guess you realize that despite it isn't a Pocket PC, I am one happy dude anyway!

[msprague]

You decided not to spring for the 3.06GHz :?:

[lord_darkside]

Why is your Dell shipping from Ireland?

Are there tiny little leprechauns in Ireland who slip in and out of the PCI slots building Dells in a fraction of a time that it takes full sized humans?

[Marc Zimmermann]

Originally Posted by lord_darkside

Why is your Dell shipping from Ireland?

Many consumer electronics and computer manufacturers are located in Ireland because of the fact that there are (or rather were in the early 90s) low wages, high unemployment rates and Ireland is part of the EU. All those points combined allowed the companies to have a profitable production site in Western Europe (circumventing high import taxes).

[Andy Sjostrom]

Originally Posted by msprague

You decided not to spring for the 3.06GHz :?:

Yes. On the budget I had, I felt adding more RAM and choosing the better graphics card was better than going to 3.06 GHz... Don't make me feel bad about my new PC even before I got it!

Why, oh, why do I feel like a loser as soon as the purchase has been settled!? I find myself looking away from computer ads, when I just a couple of days ago read them with great interest... :?

[msprague]

Originally Posted by Andy Sjostrom

Don't make me feel bad about my new PC even before I got it!

Sorry to make you feel bad. I never buy the absolute top of the line when I get a new computer. The price point just doesn't justify it. Actually, I am very jealous of your purchase. I am still running at 600 Mhz.

[Duncan]

You made the right decision (well - not sure about the brand...!) - more memory and better graphics card is going to give you a much bigger boost than the faster processor will.

Anyway - just as with Pocket PC purchases you just know the time when your shiny new purchase starts to look old is but months away...

[Fzara]

What kind of Ram? I HOPE not DDR Ram, and im hoping its RDRam.
ALso, any kind of speakers, dolby digital 5.1?
What kind of geforce4? 64mb, or the new 128mb? I hear geforce is coming out with geforce FX soon, so maybe you could have waited for that

[Paragon]

Ireland?? Geez, Andy, you won't be able to understand a word it says. On top of that you won't be able to leave a glass of Guiness sitting beside it unattended for long. 8O

Dave

[Kirkaiya]

Originally Posted by Fzara

What kind of Ram? I HOPE not DDR Ram, and im hoping its RDRam.

Darn, now you're making ME feel bad :cry:

Of course, my compter is a laptop, and as such, I can justify the slightly lower performance (especially since it weighs only 4.8 lbs without the multi-drive).

But anyway - what's wrong with DDR Ram? I just gave my previous laptop (HP Omnibook 6000, PIII 600MHz, PC100 RAM) to my wife in August when I bought my new one (Compaq Evo N610c, P4 1.8GHz, DDR Ram @266MHz). Memory-intensive apps run MUCH faster now - I even play Unreal Tourny 2003 (the ATI Radeon 7500 probably helps with that).

Anyway - I suspect that, except for 3-D gaming, almost any machine is sufficient for most things today. On my laptop, I run SQL Server 2000 as a database server, and use Visual Studio.NET (which is a resource hog if ever there was one), and it's still fast.

oh - interesting quote from a Yahoo! news article on a new supercompter (or 2) that IBM is making:

"IBM has won a contract to build two research supercomputers -- likely the fastest in the world -- for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Combined, the machines will be capable of performing more than 460 trillion calculations, or teraflops, per second, and will approach the computational ability of the human brain."

Now, that's a bit eery... close to human-brain-level... well, not MY brain, but maybe Foo Fighter's !! (ha!)
b
(see http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...19/tc_nf/20027 for full story)