But Chris the guy who does all our web projects needed a second machine with some oomph.

We chose a Dell Dimension 9200 with a decent specification

Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 2.4GHZ 4mb Cache

640mb Hard Disk with a raid controller

4gb of Ram even thought Windows Vista only reports 3gb (this is a 32bit memory thing that affects all Windows 32bit operating systems with 4gb).

Nvidia 7900GS 256mb Video Card

Windows Vista Ultimate.

First impressions

The Dimension 9200 is one of the heaviest computers I have ever lifted, the thing weighs a ton (like Server heavy).

If you dropped it on your foot you would be going to hospital.

The thing has several fans and one really prominent one at the front grill. During the initial boot the fan is spinning hard  and is really noisy but thankfully its spins down after about 30 seconds.

Yes you can see through the hole. It must be to improve air flow. I would describe the white case as Star Wars Storm Trooper white (which is cool really). The side panels are metal.

The Vista Ultimate install takes about 15mins.

During the Vista automated install the first prompt I saw was an error message the “There is no disk in the Drive”. I just hit cancel and moved on. A novice computer user might be concerned and panic when greeted with an error during the install. Not a good out of the box experience. Remember this is the first thing the user sees after the bios screen. This did not appear on subsequent reboots.

Performance

The Windows Experience Index is 5.3 and breaks down into

Processor 5.3
Ram 5.6
Graphics 5.9
Gaming 5.8
Hard Disk 5.7

I was surprised that this CPU ranked 5.3 (my Laptop Core 2 Duo 2.0Ghz got 4.9)

If you don’t know what the Windows Experience Index is see here:

Link to Screencast- Windows Vista Experience Index

So you get a lot of bang for your buck.

When I picked my own Desktop computer I chose a Precision Workstation 390 (on the left). I don’t have any user envy (yet) but my initial thoughts on the Dimension 9200 are positive. I will check in with Chris in a few weeks and see how its working for him.