I was on a lookout for a new notebook. After extensive search and excel tabulations vis-à-vis price and configuration I finally zeroed in on a Dell Inspiron 1520.

Why Dell??

Well Dell came out with flying colours when compared for configuration against price.

My budget was around Rs. 55000.00 and I seriously looked at Sony Vaio, HP, Compaq and Lenovo. Acer and others also were in my horizon at the beginning but the exact configuration that I wanted was not available in my budget.

Sony looked good but had lower HDD capacity and only 1 GB RAM. Also both RAM slots are occupied by two 512 MB cards, so if you have to upgrade then you have to discard at least one card, which is a waste.

HP was seriously competing with Dell, but was coming with only 6 cell battery and a spare battery was costing +4000 Rs. HP was offering a Vista home basic, which anyway I wanted to remove and upload XP. The build quality also looked circumspect because the shell underneath the keyboard was bending when I tried a bit of pressure on the keys. Also 2 GHz processor was not available. The 1.8 GHz model with rest of the things same as Dell was Rs. 62000.00.

You can watch an interesting video here.

Lenovo in the desired config was also too costly and came with 6 cell battery with no option of an upgrade and again had Vista home basic.

So after lot of thought and web search I decided to look at Dell. Now Dell in India like everywhere else operates on a direct marketing model, which means that there are no dealers and resellers. You have to go to the Dell website or contact them over a toll free number.

One major advantage of Dell, which is not available in any major brand is that you can configure your own PC, unlike others, where it comes fully bundled and you have to take some of what you don’t like with some of what you do.

It does not mean that you can configure everything. Some features especially the bundled operating system is thrust upon you. Like Inspiron 1420 does not come with XP, you have to necessarily take Vista. Also you cannot buy a naked PC without any software. You cannot touch and feel the PC and have first hand experience of the features.

Also once the delivery comes, you will have to setup the PC yourself as there are no Dell employees or franchisees to do it. This can be slightly difficult if you are technologically challenged. But you have help in form of a toll free technical assistance which will guide you through the process step by step. Let me see how effective they are once I get my delivery.

If you want to take delivery in Kerala, then things are a bit more difficult as you have send dell what is called Form 16 of the Keraka General Sales Tax, which is slightly difficult to procure, but you can try your luck at the nearest sales tax office. Better option is to take delivery in Tamilnadu or Karnataka and have somebody deliver it here.

All these disadvantages are small when you start configuring. The price at the bottom of the screen automatically updates as per your choice. The final price which comes will knock your head off.

You may have to shell out anything from Rs. 5000 to 10000 more if you buy any other brand with similar configuration.

Once the configuration is done you can submit the same and a Dell sales executive will call you to confirm the order and take payment options.

The surprise does not end here as I pleasantly discovered. My PC with desired configuration came to Rs. 56900.00.  Dell executives are very aggressive when it comes to closing a deal and there is fierce competition among them. After firming up the order I called up Dell to confirm something and my call was transferred to some other executive who had not dealt with me earlier. He immediately latched on to me and wanted to close the deal immediately. I told him that my budget was only 55000. He promptly obliged and reduced the price to 55000.00. After some time I called again to speak to my executive to finalise the order, I got transferred to somebody else, who promptly offered me the same PC for 53000.00. I thought, let me play the game further and tried to get some more discount through other executives, but it seems this was the lowest anybody will go. So I finally closed the deal at Rs.53000.00, which is a complete steal over all the PCs and configurations that I have seen.

I have finally ordered the following configuration

1. Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 at 2.0 Ghz
2. 2 GB RAM
3. 160 GB HDD
4. Windows XP Professional
5. 9 cell battery
6. Nvidia 8400 graphics card
7. 2 years extended warranty and damage cover

 Other bells and whistles such as 2mp camera, 15.4 in screen,  remote, stereo sound, ear plugs, USB ports, DVD R/W, bag etc are part of the system. 

The Dell executives were very friendly and ready to offer discounts. The delivery time is 21 days, which is a bit long, but tolerable considering the discounts that I just received and that the machine is made in Malaysia and shipped here.

1420 model is being produced in Chennai, so that should have lesser waiting time

Now that ordering part is over I am looking forward to the delivery and using my PC. I’ll of course write my experiences for all to benefit.

(Read about the Delivery Here)

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