Dell Optiplex vs. Vostro

Below are a list of differentiating factors that cumulatively point the overwhelming majority of institutional IT customers (including the overwhelming majority of higher education customers) to the Optiplex line. None of these facts are true for the Vostro line:

1. Length and stability of product model
   
   
   1. The Optiplex line has an average product life cycle of 17 months, with a common 3 month overlap when both the old and new models are currently available.
   2. The Optiplex line keeps commonality of components throughout the product lifecycle, allowing customers to avoid continual software image changes each time they get more PC's. These two facts allow customers to simplify their software image maintenance work, which consumes considerable amounts of IT staff time. This (along with everything else stated here) is not true of the Vostro line.
      
      
2. Supported by Dell Custom Factory Integration (CFI) program, which allows customers to delegate labor-saving tasks to Dell such as:
   
   
   1. Installing a customer software image at the factory
      
   2. Affixing a Dell (or customer) supplied mylar (or other) asset tag to equipment
      
   3. Customized BIOS settings
      
   4. Installation and configuration of custom internal hardware
      
   5. Customized packaging and labeling of boxes
      
   6. Factory-provisioning of unique pre-populated passwords
      
   7. Customized delivery, including date-specific delivery, lift-gate truck only delivery, depalletization and inside room and even floor and cube-specific delivery
      
   8. Supported by Dell's new ImageDirect web-based image development and management web-based program. This program allows customer to engage in web-based development of their software images to Dell's factory, which once set up, will allow a single (or multiple, if wished) image(s) to work across all Optiplex, Latitude, and Precision product lines; Dell also tends to all OS security patch maintenance. This is huge.
      
      
3. Standard 3-year Warranty
   
   
4. Support for quad-core CPU's
   
   
5. Energy-Smart and (Federal) Energy Star 4.0 Compliant
   Optiplex power supplies are in the 80%+ club, converting greater than 80% of the electricity drawn from the outlet into usable power for the PC.
   
   
6. ePEAT Silver environmentally responsible product design and manufacturing certification; consequently, these systems thoroughly lend themselves to easy and responsible recycling.
   
   
7. Hardware-level system management options including ASF 2.0, iAMT, and Intel vPro technology, giving IT staff significant additional management abilities previously not available.
   
   
8. Security: support for Trusted Platform Management 1.2, enabling multi-factor authentication.
   
   
9. RAID 1: optional ability to secure data via a RAID 1 pair of mirrored hard disk drives.
   
   
10. Availability of Keep Your Hard Drive program for customer retention of failed hard disk drives, to comply with federal, health, and data security policies and/or regulations.
    
    
11. Four different chassis sizes to choose from.
    
    
12. Optional 4 hour on-site service for critical systems.