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>> Hi I'm Rich Brown, senior editor for CNET.com. Today we're gonna take a look at the Dell Inspiron 531. So Dell has done away with the Dimension line in its home desktops. Instead it's divided it between the Inspiron and the XPS. Now like all Dell systems, this is very configurable. You can go pretty low and relatively high end on this. This is a mid-range configuration though, pretty much hits the sweet spot. If you're familiar with Dell's older Dimension desktops, you'll see that this new Inspiron has an updated design on their front panel. It's a little bit sleeker, a little bit more unified. You can pretty much put it wherever you want in your house. Now in addition to the desktop design, Dell's also updated its mouse. Two thumbside buttons on this one. We don't think there are very many vendors that have that on their standard default mouse. So on the front panels, relatively straight forward. On the top there's a standard DVD drive, right here there's a DVD burner drive, and right here there's actually a thirteen in one media card reader with built-in Bluetooth. That's a pretty nice option to have with this system. That means you can use it with your cell phone, any other mobile device that has Bluetooth connectivity. Now inside this system you'll see pretty mainstream config in here. Right here's an AMD Athalon 5000 plus dual core chip, pretty fast mainstream processor. There's an 8600GT graphics card, that's a nice updated card. It'll get you basic gaming performance. Then there's a fairly room 250 gig hard drive, and there's room for another one right here. And finally, back under these wires you see two gigs of memory, there's room for two more sticks as well. So it's a fairly expandable system, but generally solid for mainstream Windows Vista performance. And although it's not included in this config, Dell has finally added an internal Wi-Fi option via PCI card. It's 802.11 A, B, or G. Now for performance we actually found that this PC outperformed a system that cost about five hundred dollars more. Between that, the new design, and the advanced connectivity, this is an Editor's Choice winner. So I'm Rich Brown, and this is the Dell Inspiron 531.
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