Last Friday I went to configure my father’s new PC, a Dell Inspiron 531 mini-tower. This is Dell’s lowest-priced offering and it’s as basic as basic can get. A box with Windows XP, mouse, keyboard, power cable and not much else.

This box comes provided with a 1.6GHz single core AMD Athlon 2560e 512K, your option of Vista or XP (the chosen OS was XP), 16x DVD Burner, 1GB 800MHz DD2 RAM, 160GB 7200rpm HDD, nVidia GeForce 6150 SE Integrated video, and 1-year warranty with in-home service.

If you order this box with absolutely no options that add additional cost, the price is $249, however bear in mind there are taxes shipping charges.

Being that most people will understand how this box would work as far as speed and performance are concerned, I’m going to concentrate on setup questions instead.

How much bundled crap is in the OS?

Surprisingly little. There was a Windows Live toolbar installed in the IE browser which was annoying but easy enough to get rid of.

There were a bunch of Windows Live Essentials stuff as well, also easy to uninstall.

Trial-ware was only limited to a McAfee 30-day subscription, which I uninstalled for the freely available AVG instead.

Other than that there were a few Dell-specific support programs, and those were uninstalled as well.

Usually it’s the case where you spend hours uninstalling all this crap. But in this instance it took about 20 minutes which included a few reboots.

Does it comes with A Windows CD?

No. Dell, like many other PC manufacturers, do not provide an OS disc with lower-end models. Unfortunately this is par for the course no matter who you buy from. I wish it wasn’t.

How long does it take to upgrade?

The first thing to do with any new PC with Windows after you’ve uninstalled the crap is to run Windows Update. This is a long, tedious process, but fortunately since the OS had SP3 on it already it saved some time.

Additionally, with XP you do have to run Windows Update at least four times on a brand new OS install. The first time installs the WGA stuff, the second time is for all the critical updates, the third time is for the newest software (IE 8, Windows Media Player 11), the fourth time for critical updates to those software titles. The longest was the second.

Total time patching/upgrading was about 3 hours. It would have been faster save for the fact my father has a very basic broadband internet plan that slowed things down a bit.

How loud is it?

You can barely hear this thing running. In fact I had to specifically look at the HDD light to know if the drive was being accessed or not. It is whisper quiet.

How is the keyboard?

Very good. Dell does provide some of the best standard keyboards with their PCs.

How is the mouse?

Terrible. It’s basic, all black (and I mean all black – there’s not any other color on the entire mouse), feels odd in the hand and the software mouse options allow for almost no wheel-click control whatsoever. I had to use my father’s old Logitech optical mouse which does have those options with the MouseWare software. This wasn’t a big deal since he was used to it already.

Tip: If you have a Logitech mouse and want all the options available for it, just download the control software from here. If a Microsoft mouse, you want the IntelliPoint software (which also works perfect on Windows Vista and 7 by the way.)

How much does it weigh?

Not much. This box looks a lot heavier than it actually is.

How loud is the optical drive?

Surprisingly the DVD burner drive is very quiet. You can hear it but thankfully it doesn’t make an annoying racket when in operation.

One complaint: When the tray is open, the button to close it is blocked. You can push the drive tray closed, but nevertheless this is a design flaw.

How are the ports set up?

Four USB ports in the front mounted mid-height on the tower. Very, very convenient. This works out very nicely whether you have the box on a desk or on the floor. There are four USB ports in the back also. In front, the USB ports are horizontal 2×2. In rear, vertical 2×2.

The audio ports in rear are very plainly marked and color coded as is the video port (which is VGA by the way) and the network port.

This is a stark contrast to the way Dell boxes used to be. The user-friendly nature shows throughout. No, it’s obviously not a Mac, but this is light years better than the way yesteryear Dell boxes were.

How is the case construction?

Solid. It doesn’t feel cheap even though it is a cheap box. Even the power button feels solid.

Is it worth the cash?

I’d have to say yes. This is the lowest-priced offering and what you get is fair for the price.

This box is upgradeable, however most who would buy it probably wouldn’t do more than add in more RAM, possibly another hard drive and not much else.

There’s also a 3½ and a 5¼ bay free. You could stick one of those 13-in-1 card readers in the 3½ and whatever else you’d want in the 5¼.

Bonus: The 5¼ bay has a flap-style door in front of it, so no matter what drive you install, the box will retain it’s look. For example, if you want to add in another DVD burner, you can completely disregard the color as when it’s closed the drive is hidden by the flap. In other words, if the white drive is cheaper than the black one, go for it because it will be hidden when not in use.

What would happen if you added in some options?

The only upgrade worth getting on purchase is the AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core CPU. All other options would be cheaper to buy and install yourself.

If you tack on the best CPU available for this particular model (the X2 5600), it adds $90 to the price. However there are two others besides that which are lower, that being the X2 5000 ($60) and the X2 4450E ($30). The X2 5000 with Windows XP or (or Windows 7 later) is more than fast enough with that and 2 or 4GB RAM for daily computing purposes.

Final notes

For those wondering if this is a slim model, no it isn’t. That would be the 531s, with ’s’ for slim. I’m happy to report that the 531 is a regular mini-tower, as in the kind that’s easy to work on if you want to add things into it.

With XP this is a very good day-to-day machine. With Windows 7 it would work well also.

Just remember that this box is not meant to be a tower of power. If that’s what you’re looking for, see other models besides this one. But if you want to stay basic and cheap, it’s tough to beat the Inspiron 531.

I bought a refurbished Dell Dimension 4400 back when Windows XP was brand new in 2001. It was $625 shipped.

The only thing I ever did to it was upgrade the processor from 1.6GHz to a 2.4GHz and bumped the RAM from 256MB to 512MB. Other than that, everything in it is original. I used it for a few years then gave it to my father who has been using it ever since.

Last week it finally developed a problem. The system detected that the processor coolant fan was failing. This is indicative that a major failure is imminent, because even if I replace the fan, something else will probably bust shortly thereafter. And even if nothing happened after the fan replacement, the box is just plain old and would be too much of a risk.

After nine years of faithful service it was decided to finally retire the 4400.

Contrary to my computer needs, my father only needs the basics. He is the definition of the type of user that uses a computer "for internet and email only." And the box needed to be cheap besides that. After some research I instructed Pop to call Dell and purchase an Inspiron 531 desktop (pictured) with Windows XP, no monitor and no options. The cost with taxes and shipping was a tick under $300 and it will arrive next week.

Why didn’t I tell Pop to go for a refurb? Because at present the new Dell boxes are actually cheaper. Were he to use the Dell Outlet Store it would have cost an extra $50 even with the lowest-cost offering.

I asked Pop how his experience was with Dell sales. He said there were no issues at all. There weren’t any high-pressure sales tricks or any of that stuff, so that was good to hear.

Why did I tell him to go with XP? Because as configured the box will run XP much better than Vista.

The box comes outfitted with an AMD Athlon 2560e 1.6GHz CPU (512K) with 1GB of DDR2 RAM at 800MHz, a 16x DVD burner, nVidia GeForce 6150 SE integrated graphics and a 160GB hard drive. It also comes provided with keyboard and mouse. For just under $300 that’s not bad, especially considering it has a full 1-year warranty with in-home service.

If you were to buy a pre-built from NewEgg, the cost is about the same with shipping included.

If you were to build a box from scratch, the price is also the same. Remember, you have to add in the cost of Windows XP with all the hardware – and I’m not about to put my dad on Linux. It took long enough to get him used to Windows.

Like it or not, the cheapest computer desktop box right now hovers at or very close to $300 as the final price when all is said and done (purchase price, taxes, shipping, software license, all of it).

It kind of sucks that the 4400 box had to start developing problems now, because if it had lasted until October I would have purchased this same new box with Windows 7. Vista needs a big beefy PC to run optimally. Win 7 on the other hand will run on (much) older computer hardware. This has been proven to be true.

But oh well. XP is mature, stable and will get the job done.

The low-end Dell for the money is a decent box. It’s on par with the price of from-scratch builds and other pre-built boxes with similar specs.

I can’t give it a thumbs up or down at present because it hasn’t arrived at my dad’s place yet. Once it does I’ll be stopping over to configure/update it. When I sit down to configure this thing, I’ll post what happens here. Watch for it.