Excellent for Home or Office
Written: Mar 04 '02 (Updated Jul 15 '03)
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Pros: Easy to setup and use; incredibly easy to open and upgrade.
Cons: They don't offer Athlon processors.
The Bottom Line: I'd recommend the new 4400 series instead, since the 4300 has been discontinued. If you get a deal on a refurbished or closeout 4300, though, you won't regret it.
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| davidis99's Full Review: Dell Dimension 4300 Series |
» Describe everything that comes in the box with this desktop.
A system unit, keyboard, mouse, a Dell recovery CD, and CDs for all the software ordered.
» Did the computer work perfectly out of the box?
yes indeed! Our office has five, and they're very good.
» Does it have a fast processor but little RAM or some other weakness?
The great thing about Dell's site is how easy it is to custom configure the machines and just have them show up, take them out of box, and they work! Ours are running Windows 2000, with 256MB RAM. For most users, this is fine, although one user needs to be bumped up to 512MB. He keeps a lot of stuff open.
» How upgradeable is this computer?
You can get the system with one or two CD/DVD drives, hard drives as big as you want, plenty of PCI slots, AGP - the works. The case opens so easily, it's one of the biggest features for recommending it - press in on buttons on top and bottom, then the case opens out in a "V" shape. Everything's neat and easy to access inside.
» Ignore the specs for a moment and describe how fast the computer feels.
I thought my PIII was fast running Windows 2000 - then I saw these and got really bummed about my PIII.
» Who should buy this Computer? Gamers? Grandmas? Who shouldn't?
Given the options available from Dell, this is a good computer for anybody except someone with very tight space requirements. For them, the newer 4300S is a good option. Also, Dell has since replaced the 4300 with the 4400, which uses faster DDR SDRAM in place of standard SDRAM, making it better for power users and gamers, while avoiding the expense of RDRAM.
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Followup report - june/july 2003
Some additional information for purchasers of Dell systems, or systems with Windows XP Home.
regarding the hardware included with the systems for our office - of the five PCs purchased for the office running Windows 2000, one system began having hard drive problems, which, because this was a s.m.a.r.t. hard drive, manifested ifself through an alert from the hard drive to the user at startup that the drive was having a problem. Upon notifying Dell of the problem, their service department was very good about sending a replacement hard drive and having the defective hard drive returned to them.
In addition to the PCs for the office, one co-worker purchased one of these systems running Windows XP Home. In the case of his PC, the hardware has not been a problem, but the OS has. It has, if fact, blown up TWICE. On the first occasion, I was able to backup the user profiles (as the entire drive was FAT32) and rebuild the system. On the rebuild, I formatted the C: drive with NTFS, which is supposed to provide greater reliability.
It may well do that, and does provide better security, but when you have a kernel crash that takes the boot sector with it, having NTFS means you have a much harder time recovering data than with FAT32. The system would not provide any access to the recovery console when booting from the XP Home CD, and also would not allow a reinstall of XP Home over the existing installation because of the extent of the corruption to the existing install.
Not having a copy of winternals' recovery tools, I found a freeware tool, readntfs.exe, that, when run from a boot floppy, reads an ntfs partition that is otherwise inaccessible. While this alone is helpful, the complexity of the default folder structure for Windows 2000/XP makes recovery of data with this tool a very slow and labor-intensive process.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1200
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-ROM
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
davidis99
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Member: David Steinberg
Location: White Plains NY
Reviews written: 47
Trusted by: 0 members
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