Dell in India doesn’t offer the range of customizations that you would normally come to expect from them. Moreover calling Dell may have some unintended consequences like possibly a call from Microsoft. Here are some issues that you would like to be aware of:

1. The widely displayed configurations doesn’t allow you to remove the Operating System (Vista from Microsoft) or the bundled Microsoft Works Software. They do however have a hard-to-find link to a special version where you can remove them.

2. I wasn’t able to remove the optical device (and thus avoid the Octoroi). I didn’t need them as we get all out software simply with yum install software_name.

3. I couldn’t reduce the hard-disk to 80Gb which is available with some configurations and competing vendors. We don’t need bigger hard-disks because all our data is centrally served from NFS.

4. I couldn’t also remove McAfee Security Center which is useless for a Linux machine.

Overall I was disheartened with the minimal customizations I could make. I had better experience calling up Lenovo in Kolkata.

These observations were made for product with E-VALUE CODE : R220301. This is one of the many standard products which you can find out by clicking on Desktops -> Small Business / Commercial and then selecting customise (Dell adopted british spellings for India).

Note: There is a rather convoluted way to remove Microsoft Windows Vista or other Microsoft software from Dell machines.

Did I mention that soon after I received a call from Microsoft inquiring about Windows usage in my company and that I should look into installing Windows for new machines.

On a different note Dell’s website isn’t searchable with E-value code which is widely advertised everywhere. They expect two inputs for e-value code while the code is something like R220301. I tried different combinations without success. The customer service representative couldn’t help me either. I am pretty confident that their e-value code search is inoperable.