I was waiting for Inspiron XPS Gen 2 to become available in UK. When it finally did appear on UK's website, I was all ready to buy it. But then looking closer at specs and some upgrade prices, it suddenly started to look not as hot gaming machine, as Dell promotes it.

OK, so maybe GoForce 6800 Ultra sounds great. Who wouldn't want some extra pixel/sec.

But what about 6 USB ports - and non of them are powered?! There goes my external USB drives out of the window. Sure, I have a PS2 cable with it to draw power... but XPS Gen2 has no PS2 ports! (BTW, it's not clearly noted on US site)

OK, so even if it has Intel's 915PM (Performance) chipset, which should come with 7.1 Intel High Definition Audio, Dell used AC97 codec. OK. Maybe it's an good enough excuse to buy Creative Audigy 2 PC Card sound card.

But why does it cost £399.50 to upgrade to 1 Gig of RAM from 512MB when you can get the same Gig from Crucial for £150.38. Almost £250 difference?! For what? Are Dell's DIMMs made of gold?

One extra info I couldn't locate so far, is whether it's bootable from USB. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. But I'm starting to care less and less about it by now.

While company I work for as IT support, uses exclusively Dells (Poweredge servers and Optiplex and Dimension workstations) and I can't be happier with support and performance, it's seems for personal use it's not all rosy.

Now I have to wait for some other company to start producing Go6800 Ultra based laptops or bite the bullet and go for plain Go6800. But it won't be Dell. Which is sad, really.