Dell Vostro 200 review
I set up a Dell Vostro 200 for a client today.
This appears to be a standard mini-ATX machine with standard motherboard and power supply. The motherboard appears to be a Foxconn. The case is as good quality as the $20 Rosewill cases sold on Newegg although Rosewill has more drive bays and better expandability. Processor is dual-core (not the preferred Core 2 Duo) 1.6 ghz. The hard drive is 80 gig SATA Maxtor. RAM is 1 gig (2×512 DDR2)
Dell brags about the Vostro line’s lack of trialware. I call it trashware. Even though the customer opted out of all trashware (Norton) the system still tried to trick user into loading Google Toobar and came preloaded with Google Desktop. Google tracks behavior of their users, compiles it, stores and uses it to make money and shares it with the government without asking the user.
The $439 delivered price tag is hard to beat. Buyers need to avoid the trap of buying overpriced add-on software and hardware from Dell.
Added 11/5/2007:
Vostro 200 comes in a mini-tower form factor with standard parts and a slim form-factor that uses non standard parts and the “low-profile” PCI cards. Make sure to know what you are buying.