Honestly, I just ordered about the same exact thing for a customer of mine. We got a scratch and dent model for about $800 with next day shipping.

It's kinda crazy how they can sell these things at such a loss. Just to buy the parts without the display or keyboard would probably cost like $600 alone, so they're basically giving you a free chassis. Nutz I tell ya!

It should be enough to run Vista OK. With 128mb of GRAM you'll be limited to only having a couple windows open at a time. 256mb would've been better, but the pixel processing power should be there with the x1300.

Be sure to wipe the hard drive as soon as it shows up and do a fresh Windows install. If you want, bring it up here and I'll straighten it out. You don't want that myway and other assorted bloatware holding you back. 

The only thing i'm not completely sure about will be the pre-installed McAfee that my parents paid for.  Although I'm sure I could just re-install that by itself.  Also, I think I may have read that the HD is fat32 instead of the other way.  That's a good idea reformatting, I never would have though about doing that but its a good plan.

I'm gonna eventually put the 667 speed RAM in there, but probably in August. 

If Dell is shipping Windows XP machines with FAT32 they've really lost it. NTFS is the way to go by far. Even on my iMac I used NTFS even though it sacrificed a little functionality. NTFS is what is known as a journaling filesystem which keeps a record of all the reads and writes should have occured to repair itself in case of a powerdown. FAT32 doesn't.

I doubt you'd notice much of a speed up going from the 533 to the 667, honestly. The 1.66ghz Duo isn't going to need a whole lot of memory bandwidth, although latency would be helped. Once you start puttering around in there, I'm sure you'll have plenty of horsepower. I'd be interested to see if having one or two sticks will help out on that platform however. On the iMac, there's virtually no difference what soever between single and dual channel memory.

Wipe the drive man. You'll be much happier with a stock install. If you didn't get the optional Windows XP CD, just let me know. That restore disk will just put the same crud back in there. 

Yeah i got the "genuine windows" re-install disk.  But I'll prob put Vista on whenever I figure out which of their 5 versions I should use...HA. 

Just found out my order date has changed, now it's set to ship on the 9th(it was the 8th yesterday).  I ordered it sunday so they are saying 6 working days just to ship, which I'm kinda mad about.  I guess it's b/c i didn't get the base system, but I doubt too many people do so I don't know what the hold up is. 

I'm pretty sure Dell is getting creamed on orders for that thing. I actually ordered up a refurb from the Dell Outlet and it shipped in like 24 hours, was at the door in like 72 max. Plus I saved the customer like $300 on it. Granted, it wasn't perfect, but you can't beat the price or shipping time.

    I'll let you know when a public Vista beta pops up. You'll probably want to just repartition the drive to have a XP and Vista dual-boot setup, I don't think Vista will be ready for primetime for a while yet, there's even some talk about the launch getting shoved up to like April now. It's only like a year late as is, why not tack on a few more weeks  

Ha, figures.  Maybe they'll do a better job than they did with XP when they first released it.

So they changed my date again from shipping on the 9th to being here tomorrow, Friday.  I guess I can't complain. 

Hey that's good news. If it shows up by the weekend, maybe you can make a trip up here to get the labotomy.

That doesn't look too good. The only times I've had PCMark not run a test is when memory was too overclocked or something. You may want to download memtestx86 and check that out.

It failed b/c i had my laptop set to "best performance" versus best appearance.  I also had to download something.  I forget what it was, maybe a directX plugin or something.  I'm gonna run it again soon, I'll let you know how it goes.

 I didnt have Media Encoder 9 installed, so here's the new results

HDD - XP Startup	5.52 MB/s
Physics and 3D	65.5 FPS
Transparent Windows	86.88 Windows/s
3D - Pixel Shader	30.78 FPS
Web Page Rendering	2.23 Pages/s
File Decryption	41.51 MB/s
Graphics Memory - 64 Lines	280.05 FPS
HDD - General Usage	3.73 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 1 / Audio Compression	1647.61 KB/s
Multithreaded Test 1 / Video Encoding	265.78 KB/s
Multithreaded Test 2 / Text Edit	88.99 Pages/s
Multithreaded Test 2 / Image Decompression	19.7 MPixels/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / File Compression	3.77 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / File Encryption	20.15 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / HDD - Virus Scan	14.1 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / Memory Latency - Random 16 MB   2646  PCMarks	7.01 MAccesses/s

Also, how can I force my video card to use more RAM.  It doesn't appear to be using any and I thought it would take at least 64 to go with the 64 it already has to equal 128.  Anyway, let me know how it fairs.

Umm, hopefully Dell's drivers include the Catalyst Control Center, but I can't guarantee that. ATI's standard mobility drivers don't support Dell lappies, so you're kinda SOL on that one. ATI uses a Hypermemory thing that dynamically grabs RAM when it needs it, so it may not show until you run a 3d app.

You can compare to my iMac here. My desktop wooped up on most everything coming in around 4200 marks. The Core Duo wins in the multi-threaded stuff, as expected, but apart from that my rig is substancially quicker.

Yeah it has the CCC.  I guess thats why it doesn't show up as using any RAM under the system profile or whatever its called in windows.

I'll let you know when a public Vista beta pops up. You'll probably want to just repartition the drive to have a XP and Vista dual-boot setup, I don't think Vista will be ready for primetime for a while yet, there's even some talk about the launch getting shoved up to like April now. It's only like a year late as is, why not tack on a few more weeks .

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hopefully Dell's drivers include the Catalyst Control Center, but I can't guarantee that. ATI's standard mobility drivers don't support Dell lappies, so you're kinda SOL travel on that one. ATI uses a Hypermemory thing that dynamically grabs RAM when it needs it, so it may not show until you run a 3d app