Dell Dimension XPS T550

At the time of writing, Dell was bundling Office 97 SBE, and this should have been replaced by Office 2000 SBE by now, so the purchase price of the machine includes most, if not all, of the standard business software you need to get started out of the box.

This is an extremely fast machine, and is equal to almost any task. The Evesham Micros and NEC PIII/550s (see opposite) were faster, though. This is mostly due to their Voodoo3 graphics cards, which offer significant 2D/3D performance improvements over the older nVIDIA TNT chipset. That's the one area where Dell could realistically have gone further, and I suspect it won't be long before that changes as well.

Author: Dominic Bucknall