How Many External 5 1/4" Drive Bays In a Dimension 4700?

[Ornery]

I think my sister-in-law just wasted about $50.00. She ordered an Outrageous Deal, which I told her to buy stripped! She added a "Dual Drives: 48x CD-ROM Drive + 48x CD-RW Drive" option because she said it would only have one external bay if she didn't. I told her before that they come with two external bays, but I want to make sure I'm right. Haven't ordered one of their PCs for a LONG time, so things may be different now. I called Dell, but they're not open for sales on Sunday. Anybody know for sure, one way or the other?

 

[MustISO]

It'll have two external 5 1/4" regardless of how many drives you ordered.

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Agreed. The case and number of bays (2) is the same no matter how many drives you order.

If she was planning on getting a CD-RW anyway she didn't waste much money - the extra seperate CD-Rom wouldn't have added much. HOWEVER it would be more cost effective to buy a single DVD-RW drive if she thinks she might ever need to burn DVDs.

You can always call first thing Monday morning and change the order.

I recommend Dell to all my clients and they usually pay me to help them order them. Some other things to be aware of with Dell:

- You can often find some better un-advertised Dell special offers here: http://gotapex.com

- The floppy drive is extra (usually $30). If you need one add it. You can always get an external USB floppy later though for about the same price from Walmart.

- Most of the Deals of the Week come with only a 90 day warranty. I would DEFINATELY recommend you upgrade to the 1 year warranty which usually only costs an extra $20. Keep in mind that Dell's warranty is an ON SITE warranty so it's worth it. Anything fails in the first year, they come out and fix it. Just never let tech support talk you into troubleshooting it yourself. Demand that they send someone out or they'll have you pulling the cover off and wiggling wires.

- Most of the deal of the week come with only 256Mb. I don't consider this enough even for a causual "Little old lady" user anymore considering that the Dell usually comes with a 90 day trial of Norton Internet Security installed, and that alone will use up almost all the memory. Also a lot of the modern printers use rediculously large background apps - especially all-in-one printers. You can easily find you're using 256Mb on bootup without running any apps.

If you're on a very tight budget you can get a way with 256Mb BUT you need to keep background apps to a minimum and use small footprint apps. I would highly recommend replacing Norton with AVG Free anti-virus from Grisoft which has a very small memory footprint.

 

[Ornery]

She was talking about spending close to $1,000 for a computer. I told her about Dell's Small Business deals, and explained that $500.00 could buy one with a 19" LCD included. Next thing I know, she's asking about buying a higher end Dell. :roll: Here's the email I sent her on the 31st of July after she asked about buying the 9100 system, as well as a slew of other questions:

1. No hurry on the system. These deals seem to be ongoing anymore.
2. Pentium 4, 2.8GHz is PLENTY for CPU power, and could be upgraded later anyway.
3. Not much use for floppies these days, with cheap thumb drives and CDRWs around. If you're networked, you can connect to a PC with a floppy if the need arises.
4. The Dimension 4700 does have two 5 1/4" external bays, and a name brand DVD burner can be had for $50.00. Dell wants $90.00 to upgrade to a DVD burner, which would replace the base configuration's 48X CD-ROM drive. Buying a DVD burner later would be cheaper, higher quality AND keep the original CD drive!
5. Speakers are a dime a dozen at Micro Center on clearance.
6. I'd skip the extra warranty.
7. The video card in the Dimension 9100 can be had for about $50.00
   256MB more memory is $20.00, and Dell wants $40.00.
8. 20" digital monitor VS 19" analog is certainly not worth several hundred more dollars IMO.
9. $20.00 to bump the hard drive up to 80GB from 40GB is not bad.
10. The network interface is built into the motherboard. Just plug it into the router, switch or broadband modem.
11. $535 VS $918 is a no brainer here. The $535.00 system has been available twice in the last three weeks, and was $20.00 cheaper the week before that. It even included a free printer two weeks before that time. I doubt it would hurt to wait for a slightly better deal to show up.

So, despite all the hand holding and details, she STILL screws it up! $60.00 for a no-name CD-RW Drive is ludicrous!