Dell factory outlet bargains

whoop-dee-doo

If you want to upgrade a Dell with a bigger hard disk or more ram etc., do you have to buy from dell or are they standard bits inside?

Geoggy

http://www.outletbargains.co.uk

Despite Geoggy's cynicism,

more facts than cynicism mate.

although you are right - there are some great blokes on there that will pass systems on that they are not looking to sell. there are also some good sorts that will give you lots of advice.

Roger_Rampant

You could put other HDs and RAM into them, but some of their parts are non-standard. I wouldn't recommend buying a Dimension 2400 and upgrading it, for example, as you'd probably be better off buying a better PC in the first place

Vintage67

Dell generally use standard components these days - the main problem areas are the case / psu / motherboards, as they use non-standard connectors for case LEDs/buttons etc, so a motherboard upgrade usually means a new case & PSU as well (though that will hardly break the bank!). Processor, RAM and hard drive upgrades are as easy as on any other PC (and often easier), though beware that the Dimension 2400s only have a 'cage' that holds 1 hard drive, and fitting a floppy to a non-floppy machine will be tricky as there's no cage to hold it (both these problems can be overcome with a few bits of bent metal / meccano though!). The Dimension 2400/3000 have onboard graphics and no AGP slot, the 4600/4700/5000 have onboard graphics & an AGP slot (4600) or PCI-express (4700&5000), and the 8400 has PCI-express only. They all have at least 2 PCI slots to add extra cards. Don't even think about overclocking a Dell though, as the BIOS has no overclocking options whatsover.
My personal recommendation if buying a Dell is to get the cheapest spec possible and then add the extra components you want from eBuyer, since Dell's cost to upgrade from CDRW to DVDRW or to upgrade to a bigger hard drive is usually more than the cost of buying the bigger drive elsewhere, and if you buy the components yourself you get to keep the originals as 2nd drives.

GDB2222

Vintage67 has got it absolutely right! I have several Dell PCs, and I can confirm everything he said.

cubegame

guys - im afraid you (and i) are smaill fish in a very big pond on this one.

there is a whole website dedicated to bargain hunting on the dell outlet.

you wont get a good spec machine on the website by simply looking.

these guys are computer programmers that have written programs to nab all the bargains so they only appear for a nano second.

you may find some bargains - but they will be the crumbs these guys dont want.

new machines are dropped at 35 minutes past the hour.

get your f5 key ready.

Not entirely true about the scripts. I have one which I have used in the past but my best bargains have actually been found by F5'ing.

Your big problem is that sometime last summer, Dell actually worked out that it was better to make some more money on these machines themselves than selling them at stupid prices and letting people tout them on Ebay.

My best bargain was two D400 laptops, RRP of £1400 each, for £374 all in. That just wouldn't happen now.

Roger_Rampant

You press F5 to refresh the page in most internet browsers, so you keep pressing F5 at 35 mins past the hour, so that the instant the website is updated you see the changes and leap in quick!

tjhooker1975

Or use a web browser that you can set to autorefresh; I used to use Opera, now using firefox with the autorefresh add-in, refreshing the outlet page every 5 seconds 24 hours a day...

As a poster above said, you're never going to compete with the people running scripts, but the help and advice they offer in the forum is second to none; one of the friendliest forums i've ever been a part of- they certainly believe in sharing the wealth and knowledge.

GDB2222

but the help and advice they offer in the forum is second to none; one of the friendliest forums i've ever been a part of- they certainly believe in sharing the wealth and knowledge.

If you're talking about this forum, I'll second that. Everybody is really friendly and kind, especially compared to newsgroups.

mrwibble

Thirded ! Got some good machines for EBay - made £300 profit and got my new toy a 3.4Ghz XPS with X800XT graphics card for £800 inclusive. Great advice but don't ask how to use scripts to blag the uber-bargains !