Dell doing well

Dell Computer turned in impressive financial results last week. In its latest financial quarter, it increased sales by 11% to $8.46 billion, and posted a profit of $501 million. AP reports founder Michael Dell saying that the worst business conditions were during the third quarter in 2001. "It's been heading north...That was the bottom." There have also been some silly stories about Dell shipping systems to large corporate users without copies of Microsoft Windows, from September 1. As the CNet version belatedly makes clear, these cost the same as PCs shipped with Windows, so it would be silly to buy them if you wanted to save money by installing a rival operating system. Corporate buyers like them because it makes it easy to install Windows by copying a disk image of their standard set-up. Dell has already tried selling PCs with Linux pre-installed (at extra cost), but withdrew from that market, basically because the volumes were very low and support costs made it unprofitable.