If you were thinking of buying a new Dell PC but Vista makes you want to crawl under the bed, go into fetal position and suck your thumb, you can cancel those plans because Dell does have a few boxes that you can have delivered brandy-new with XP instead of Vista.

There are 4 boxes. Two Inspiron and two XPS desktop models.

None of these are Dell’s top-of-the-line models - but they are new and at least you’re not forced into buying Vista whereas you were before.

Perks:

• With the exception of one XPS model, they all come with an included 19-inch digital widescreen flat panel monitor.
• All boxes have Intel processors, starting at 2GHz.
• Three of them have Core 2 Duos, one with dual-core.
• The base RAM offering is 1GB on 2 models. The other 2 have 2GB standard.
• The smallest hard drive offering is 250GB.
• All have 1-year in-home (meaning on-site) warranty service. Includes parts and labor.
• All have DVD burner drives.
• Three have the Integrated Graphics Media accelerator, one has the nVidia 8800 GT 512MB.

The best bang-for-the-buck model:

Dell Inspiron 530 (not the 530s).

It’s a regular tower and not a slim. Suggestion: When “configuring” the machine, ditch the existing Intel Accelerator and go for the nVidia or ATI Radeon video card. If none of the offerings are your thing you can always replace with a card you can purchase later on.