I have been saving and planning on purchasing a new laptop. Laptops from Dell have always been high on my list of laptops and I had been interested in the Dell Vostro 1400 laptop, but Dell Australia changed the warranty options for their Vostro laptops (no CompleteCare past the first year), so I was instead looking at the Inspiron 14 (1420), which offers the option for CompleteCare for the full term of the extended warranty.
It’s been taking much longer than I had originally planned to finally be in a place to get a new laptop. Recently though my wife’s Dell Inspiron 2650 finally died after over 5-years of service. This has left us in the undesirable situation of only having one computer (that sounds a bit greedy after reading it, but I need one for work and she needs one for communications and support raising).
I’ve been looking at what Dell was planning to replace the Inspiron 1420 with and it looks like the Dell Inspiron 13 is it.
I reckon that the Inspiron 13 looks like a handy little laptop, and the reviews of it seem to say that for the price it’s a good value.
For the last few weeks I have been waiting for the Dell web-site in Australia to update their pages with the Dell Inspiron 13. They have had a fixed model up since the global launch of the laptop, but I don’t want their standard configuration.
Unfortunately it looks like for some stupid reason Dell Australia will not be offering customisation of the Dell Inspiron 13! According to comment #34 on this forum post they will not be offering customization on the laptop in Australia.
I tried to get confirmation of this by talking to a Dell rep, but all I was told was that I can’t customize the laptop at this time. They didn’t know if it would be possible in the future.
So now it looks like I will be waiting another 4 – 6 months and I will purchase a new Dell laptop when I get to Canada. The thing that I like the most about the Dell laptops is the International Warranties that you get with them. Because of that warranty I can purchase the laptop in Canada and get it serviced pretty much anywhere.