urandom

Last monday I had to order a computer for use as a workstation for a graphic designer. When I called Dell and asked for a specification on a Dimension system, the — overall very helpful and friendly — account manager stated that the Dimension range was discontinued for business customers and available for consumers only. He told me that the new Vostro line was their new SMB offer.

When I pointed out to him that not only was the Dimension still listed on their SMB web pages, but that the Vostro was inattractive because it could not be upgraded beyond 4GB of memory, he was surprised at first and then stated that `a 64 bit OS was needed anyway to be able to use more than 4GB of memory'.
But if I needed more memory, a Precision workstation would be a good alternative. Well, any Precision I could configure on the Dell website would end up costing 1.5 times as much as a similarly configured Dimension. (which means that I had to add a graphics card with higher 3D performance on the Dimension as what was needed, since this computer was meant for 2D graphic design)
At this point, the sales representative tried building a Precision configuration himself to specifications I had provided him with, but with maximum discount he could apply the price still came out over 30% (meaning, over 300 EUR) more than a Dimension to these same specs. At which point he gave in :)

I seriously hope that the sales person was mistakenly saying that the Dimension would go away as a Dell business offer (though that means that some review of internal communications would be in order). While I'm sure the Vostro line has it's merit, these are some points that make it a lousy or at least undesirable option in some cases:

• memory size limited to 4GB
• currently, no quad core processor option — while this may not be very benificial a lot of the time it would improve workloads that can make use of threading; in addition the Q6600 on the Dimension was only about 10 EUR more costly than the dual core E6600
• while it wasn't that much of an issue in this case, the actual lack of an option to configure a better 3D graphics card than the preconfigured card

The way I see it, the Vostro should be a valuable add-on to Dell's SMB offering at the bottom segment. Throwing out the Dimension would leave a hole between Vostro and Precision. And I'm not sure where exactly the Optiplex fits in; it appears to be more along the Vostro looking at specs, but it's price tag is closer to Precision — it's main feature seems to be a higher default support level.