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Computers are today our basic requirements. When we
work we need
them to connect with other people, retrieve information and
control manufacturing units. At home we chat, play games,
use
them for interactive activities like pod casting and for
watching movies etc. There are lots of places you can shop
for
computers, if you are planning to either replace an existing
one
or buy a new one. One resource for low cost computers is
Dell.
Dell is a leading US-based computer hardware company,
Dell Inc.
Dell has over 63,700 employees the world over. Dell's
operations
span development, manufacture, support and marketing of
personal
computers, servers, data storage devices, network
switches,
personal digital assistants (PDAs), software, peripherals,
etc.
The location of Dell headquarters is in Round Rock, Texas,
USA.
In 2005, Forbes 500 ranked Dell 28th among the largest US
companies revenue-wise. Dell topped Fortune magazine's
annual
list of the most admired US companies the same year. The
company's press releases in January 2005 revealed
increased
international sales for the first two quarters of the fiscal
year 2005. An ominous article "It's Bad to Worse at Dell"
appeared in the November 2005 edition of BusinessWeek,
predicting decline in earnings and sales and a pessimistic
third
financial quarter prediction. Faulty capacitors on
motherboards
of the Optiplex GX270 and GX 280 had already been
acknowledged
by Dell at a loss of $300 million, which CEO Kevin Rollins
partially blamed a low-end PC focus on.
Around 2004, a Dell Dimension desktop PC was marketed
with
different brand names for different consumer segments.
OptiPlex,
Latitude and Precision were for medium and large business
clients, advertising durability, reliability and functionality.
The Dimension Inspiron and XPS brands are ideal for
consumers,
students and small offices due to value, performance and
expansion. The recently re-introduced Dell XPS targets the
gaming segment. Silver instead of black cases is used for
Dell
XPS desktops. Non-computer products started with the
portable
digital audio player, Digital Jukebox or Dell DJ, apart from
USB
keydrives, LCD tvs, Windows mobile PDAs and printers.
Brand names for product ranges include OptiPlex for office
desktops, Dimension for desktops, Latitude for commercial
laptops, Inspiron for consumer laptops, Precision for
workstations and high-performance laptops, PowerEdge for
larger
corporate servers; PowerVault for direct-attach and
network-attached storage (NAS), Dell EMC for storage area
networks, XPS for enthusiast/high-performance systems
and Axim
for PDAs utilizing Microsoft's Windows Mobile.
Microsoft Windows XP is Dell's current choice for most new
computers along with Red Hat and SUSE for servers. Bare-
bones
computers minus pre-installed software have considerably
lower
rates. Licensing contracts with Microsoft ensures availability
on request only, with a FreeDOS disk included. A Windows
refund
is issued after a regular retail price sale.
Dell's Windows comes with substantial software. There
have been
accusations of spyware and instructions to technical support
team to avoid de-installation. Dell made no secret of an offer
to Apple for a future Intel version of Mac OS X but the latter
chose to run OS only on Macs, declining to license Mac OS
X to
Dell.
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