Dell XPS 420

The front of the XPS 420's midsize tower case is composed of a glossy black plastic that looks great when clean, but tends to highlight fingerprints. Our test unit included several nice options: front-mounted S-Video and RCA ports with the unique Xcelerator option for hardware transcoding of video to your hard drive; a small top-mounted LCD that uses Microsoft's Sideshow secondary display technology to display Window's Vista sidebar gadgets; and Bluetooth to handle the included wireless GM952 keyboard and RM-RBB-DEL 4 mouse. The generous software bundle includes Microsoft Works Suite 2006, Adobe Elements Studio (Premiere 4, Photoshop 6--$349 retail), Roxio's Easy Media Creator Premiere ($79), and CyberLink's PowerDVD.

Like its Q9550-equipped sibling, the QX9650-based XPS 420 has only one open drive bay--and that's with the two Hitachi 7200-rpm 320GB drives running in a striped array mounted on the bottom of the case.

Because the resolution of the 22-inch Dell 2208WFP monitor is only 1680 by 1050, the display has to down-convert 1080p Blu-ray movies before the included Blu-ray/DVD drive can play them. If you want top-quality high-definition movie playback, consider upgrading to the 24-inch 1920 by 1200 monitor that Dell offers.