With its new Studio Desktop, Dell finally brings its mainstream desktop line into the 64-bit era. The glossy black midtower PC presents little in the way of innovative design, but by offering the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, Dell now competes on even footing with HP, Gateway, and other vendors w
We first reviewed a Dell Inspiron with the S-model chassis over a year ago, back when Dell used AMD chips in its lower-end PCs. Since that time, the Inspiron has become Dell's budget sub-brand, and it's moved back to an Intel-only shop, at least for now. Based on this recent $499 Inspiron 530s model
Dell's Inspiron 530 may be the best PC deal on store shelves. Thanks to an aggressive CPU and hard-drive selection, this $599 desktop outclasses its competition, delivering the best performance we've seen in a desktop for less $600. It also provides an instructive lesson regarding processor speed ve
When we looked at the customizable version of the Dell Studio Desktop a month ago, we were unimpressed with Dell's effort. This off-the-shelf model is much more compelling. Available at Best Buy, this $799 PC is faster than its competition, offers more useful features, and it's also better designed.
The Dell Studio XPS is the fourth PC we've reviewed from Dell using the same glossy black midtower chassis. We're still excited by this system, however, because it's another affordable PC with Intel's powerful new Core i7 desktop CPU. The Studio XPS reviewed here is a $1,299 configuration that outpe
We liked Sony's Vaio LV180J 24-inch all-in-one because it works as a relatively complete secondary home entertainment system. Despite Dell's ambitions in that direction with its own XPS One 24, we don't think it's as well suited to the purpose. Instead, Dell's new large screen all-in-one fares bette
The $500 Dell I530S-119B is a refresh of Dell's Inspiron "S" line of low-end, low-budget desktop PCs with a slim chassis. This model has many of the same basic specifications as the Inspiron I530S-114B that we reviewed a few months ago, but this time around, Dell speeds up the processor an
Back in 2007, we reviewed Dell's XPS 420 that focused in on digital video with a few other light upgrades on the side. Just over a year later, Best Buy and Dell now offer the $900 Dell XPS 430-121B, a lightweight version of the Dell's customizable media-centric system. This refresh leaves out the su
Normally we criticize gaming PCs from large vendors like Dell for failing to keep their specs as aggressively up to date as their boutique competition. But after looking for systems to compare with Dell's new $1,499 XPS 625, it seems as of this writing that the entire desktop market is behind in off
We recently matched this $650 off-the-shelf Dell Inspiron I530-120B against a $560 HP Pavilion a6700y. The results weren't good for HP. But as that HP looked subpar compared with the slightly more expensive Dell, we can make a similar charge against this Dell system when we hold it next to HP's step