Last July, I bought a "refurbished" Dell 8300 for $775.00
It came with the
EXACT same warranty as a new Dell.
The Dimension 8300 came with a Pentium 4 at 2.60 with the 800 front side bus and Intel 875 motherboard, 512 MB of PC-3200 RAM, a Western Digital Hard Drive and Windows XP-Pro.
For all of the "rookies" out there that talk a lot of crap about Dell and have no idea what they are saying, the Intel 875 motherboard is the top of the line motherboard, complete with Serial ATA onboard support.
I added another 512MB of RAM for $118.00
I replaced the stock power supply unit with a 400 watt "Silencer-400" from PC Power & Cooling for $150.00, and just recently added a 36.7 Gig Western Digital Serial ATA "Raptor" Drive that has an 8mb buffer and runs at 10,000 RPM for another $120.00
So for $1163.00 I got a pretty fast and reliable system.
Is Dell Tech Support "fair" at best?
Yes, it is . . . and it can be very frustrating at times.
It "works" for the basic kinds of inquiries, but becomes the luck of the draw when you are asking about more complicated issues. The neat thing about Dell is the Community Forum, where one can get a ton of info and answers on the message boards . . .
It has worked well for me, and I have purchased 2 refurbished units since 2000, with no problems at all.
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