Dell targets kebab shops with new Vostro range

Dell's marketing types have been busy developing a new brand for small business customers. It's called Vostro and it's Latin for 'yours', which sounds like the name of an evil super villain to us. The sort of chap Flash Gordon would take great delight in kicking seven shades out of.

Vostro comprises a range of laptops and desktop PCs that are optimised for 'pure business performance'. In other words they're loaded with simple-to-use tools to monitor the health of your PC, perform easy backups, and have specialised tech support with dedicated IT staff. Oh, and they don't have any unwanted bloatware, either.

Why Vostro? Dell says it's carried out a 12-country survey of small business owners and decision makers and come away with some amazing revelations. The most shocking of these is that businesses really value computers, but their number one concern is price. Who'd have thunk it?

As a result, the Vostro is very cheap -- cheaper even, than the Latitude range. The entry-level 15.4-inch Vostro 1000 laptop starts from £270 (including VAT, excluding shipping) and includes an AMD Sempron 3500+ CPU, 512MB of RAM, Vista Home Basic, a one-year business warranty and an 80GB hard drive.

The entry-level Vostro 200 mini-tower desktop starts from £216 (including VAT, excluding shipping) and includes an Intel Celeron 420 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, Vista Business Edition, a one-year business warranty, 160GB hard drive and a 19-inch flat-panel monitor. Those are pretty terrible CPUs, but they're perfectly fine for knocking up a quick spreadsheet and then skiving on Facebook.

Sounds good to us. Snap one up from the Dell Web site and take your kebab shop to the next level. -Rory Reid