Orangeman Burns - Sriram Sridharan's Blog

Hi there! Here's some news. My old workhorse of a PC has been working tirelessly for 5 years now and though I hate to say it, it's time to move over to a newer model . I decided to get a desktop from Dell. Dell's made a very good impression with me with it's relatively cheap prices, good support options and excellent customizability. I was looking for a desktop in the sub Rs. 40,000[~US $800] range. I'd probably get some swanky new Studio or XPS desktop in US for that kind of moola, but at Dell India I had to make do with the Inspiron desktop series. Inspiron's a series of Desktops and Notebooks aimed at the home usage segment. Don't get me wrong, Inspiron's a great series, but I did have a little more in mind. Nevertheless, I found two models available for me. The Inspiron 535 and Inspiron 545 series. I immediately discarded the slim versions[Inspiron 535s and the Inspiron 545s] since they had puny 200W PSUs. I opted for the Inspiron 545 series since it had the newer GM33 chipset compared to the older GM31 chipset on the Inspiron 535 series desktop.

Here's the configuration I opted for:

• Piano Black casing
• 3GB DDR2 RAM (2GB + 1GB) @ 800MHz
• Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz processor with 3 MB L2 cache
• 500GB SATA HDD with NCQ
• 18.5" Widescreen TFT Monitor
• Laser mouse
• 18 in 1 flash card reader
• Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit with free upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium 32bit
• DVD+/-RW with Dual Layer Write Capabilities
• ATI Radeon HD 4350 512MB DDR2
• McAfee AntiVirus - 15 Months subscription

I bought a Logitech QuickCam Connect [640x480 video] and a Creative VOIP headset at a local electronics store nearby. Everything cost me about Rs. 39,000[~US $790] including taxes, shipping and freight insurance.

The Dell Inspiron 545 MT arrived within a week of my placing the order. I got a service tech at my home the next day for installation. He was quite knowledgeable, he helped us get the old PC out, clean it a bit. My dad has some reservations with Vista, having heard all the horror stories we all have. I don't think he was quite satisfied with my explanation that Vista is quite stable with SP2 installed, 3GB RAM and a discrete graphics card. The initial configuration was done in a few minutes and IE7 took less than a few seconds to start. I downloaded FireFox 3.5 (which was released the day before) and it literally zoomed. I then updated the OS to SP2 (shipped with SP1), installed VLC, K-Lite Mega Codec Pack, Media Player Classic and Revo Uninstaller. I removed Microsoft Works, Dell Dock and other bloatware with Revo. This is my first long term exposure with Vista and I love it. Everything's pretty fast, Aero's cool and UAC grows on you.

Let me sign off with a snap of the new Dell Inspiron 545 MT Desktop:


P.S. I'm sorry about the mess in the photo.

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