Dell 8100 - The Future-proof System

I bought my Dell 8100 four months ago when I finally decided to replace my old workhorse - the Dell Dimension XPS P60 which I had bought 6 years ago for £2590! When I bought the P60 it was the 2nd most powerful PC system available - the most powerful being the Dell Dimension XPS P75. By today's standards these 'beasts' are an embarrassment. The P60 had a throbbing 60 MHz Pentium I processor and a gigantic 500Mb hard disk! Over the last few years I struggled with the P60, forever having to archive files as I was always running out of memory and to use the Internet was painful but I stuck with it because the thought of transferring 6 years info onto another system was too daunting.

Within a few weeks of buying my P60 I had problems and under the terms of purchase, a technical bod came to my premises to put things right. He quickly discovered that something was wrong with the 16Mb of memory installed and replaced it without hesitation. He then ran his Diagnostics program and realised that something was wrong with the motherboard which he replaced the next day. On further checking, the graphics card which had 1 Mb memory needed to be replaced. However, he explained that my graphics card was already out of date and he therefore replaced it with a much better 2 Mb card. He then noticed that there was a slight flicker on the monitor, so yes, you guessed, this was replaced with a much better monitor. All this free upgrading was done with profuse apologies and I felt sure that no other supplier would have been so keen to put matters right. I pledged from that day onwards that I would always stick with Dell.

This system came with Windows ME and Works Suite 2001 and a load of other goodies including a free Lexmark Z32 colour printer and a free Kodak EZ200 camera. I placed my order by phone on Friday 22nd June and received the goods on Wednesday 27th June - which I thought was truly amazing. Realistically, I had the system up and running within an hour and I couldn't believe the difference between this black, sexy beast and my old, cream coloured nag!

And how is it performing? Like a dream - I still can't believe its speed. The Internet is now a pleasure, which brings me to the only problem that I have had with it. I ordered an internal ISDN Card for the system so that I could take advantage of the BT Highway system that I had had installed. This was to enable faster transfer of files to and from my work colleagues and to speed up my Internet connection. Unfortunately, my system provider is AOL and I think that ISDN is a complete mystery to 99% of AOL's staff.

The only other snag that I have found with the 'package' is the lack of hard copy manual information on things such as Monitor Settings'etc. I think Dell expect you to rely on the on-line information they provide, whereas I actually feel more comfortable knowing that I can read a manual if I want to.

If you are wondering why I also bought an internal ZIP drive, I ordered it because I need to be able to transfer files between my PC system and my G4 Apple Mac system and as the latest Mac systems do not have floppy disk drives, the usual way of transferring files for these is on ZIP disks.