The Dell Dimension 2400 provides a decent feature set for students at a reasonable price. Although it’s powered by the older 2.66-GHz Pentium 4, the system is loaded with 512MB of RAM, a spacious 80GB hard drive, a 19-inch CRT monitor, dual optical drives(one DVD-ROM and one CD-RW drive), and stereo Altec Lansing speakers with a subwoofer. But unlike the eMachines, HP, and iBuyPower offerings, the 2400 has no memory card reader.
Dell packs a generous software bundle with the 2400, though, including apps for word processing, researching papers, and organizing photos.
With a compact design, the 2400 has only one internal 3.5-inch bay for the hard drive. The lack of an AGP slot marries you to the integrated Intel graphics solution. You can, however, upgrade to 2GB of system memory, and there are three PCI slots, although one is used by the included 56K modem.
The 2400’s performance was a mixed bag. It came in last on Business Winstone with a score of 17 and fared next to last on Multimedia Content Creation Winstone with a score of 22.9. Its performance was middle of the road on 3DMark03 with a score of 79, but was a top scorer on most of our Photoshop 7.01 tests.
Although the limited up-gradability of this unit might be too restricting for those with computer-heavy majors, it does make a great buy for students with simple computing needs.
Bottom Line:
The T3092 is a good alternative for students who are into instant gratification.