DIRK™ vs. Dell......FIGHT!!!

Here's an item for the geeks amongst you: I WASTED three frigging hours last night trying to order an Inspiron 6000 to take advantage of a $750 off $1499 deal Dell is running. I configure a unit, try to apply the coupon and discover that I had to choose from and tweak the configurations to one of three versions.

One had a Celeron (strike one!), the second had a 3-year warranty that I couldn't remove and the third didn't allow me to choose the WSXGA LVD I wanted, leaving me to pick between the lackluster (according to reviews) plain WXGA panel or the $175 extra WUXGA panel which is too tiny for comfort.

I also wanted the DVD burner upgrade ($99) and the 9-cell battery ($99) and that's all good, but if I wanted to get the Media Center flavor of Windoze eXPee (only $39 more), I'd have to equip with 512MB RAM, which costs $75 for that 2nd 256MB stick. Yuck. I can find 512MB for $60 online, but you can't under-equip a piece and upgrade it later, dammit!

When all the pushing and tugging and taxes were done, I was looking at $1,121.55 and that's a lot more than the $800-$900 I was hoping to shell out. IF I could've gone thru the computer salad bar and config what I'd wanted, I would've hit the mark.

Michael Dell's a liberal, isn't he? :(

Oh well....maybe another deal will come soon. Stay tuned.