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I rate Dell computers quite highly. Although they may not be the most sexy PC’s available, I’ve always found them to be reliable with pretty good performance. I particularly like their warranty and support plans, and on the very few times that I have needed hardware repairs, Dell have always worked hard and quickly to rectify any problems.

So all in all, in my opinion, Dell computers (including their excellent servers) are a good bet.

There is something to be very wary of, though, and that is their shipping charges, which are a complete rip off.

I need a new laptop and saw that Dell had some great offers at the moment. I was just about to place an order with them, but almost fell off my chair when it came to viewing the shopping basket on their web site.

£60 (£51 + VAT) for the shipping costs of a laptop!

This is about 8% of the total purchase costs, including three year on site hardware warranty. How can Dell justify such high shipping costs?

So I did a bit of investigation on their web site. I specified out a Poweredge PE6800 tower server and then added it to my cart.

Now this server weighs 55.39Kg (122 lbs). Its a 6U form factor and is a two man lift. The shipping cost for this weighty beast is £57.68 (£49 + VAT)!

So Dell will charge you less to ship a 122lb server than a 5lb laptop!

Thinking about that excellent three year hardware warranty, I didn’t really want to buy a laptop from another supplier so I decided to phone Dell and negotiate away the shipping charge.

In my experience, Dell will always negotiate as long as you can substantiate your facts and are reasonable. After a bit of persuasion (me saying I’m going to buy a laptop today, so its either a Dell or another make), their sales woman reduced the overall system costs, thereby getting rid of their rip off shipping charge.

So buyers be wary. Those great headline deals on the Dell web site may be hiding unreasonably high shipping costs.

I’ve been looking at various blogging products for a while now. I’ve downloaded numerous products and dutifully installed, briefly tried, and then deleted most of them. Two I have kept coming back to.

I have followed pMachine since the early days of that product. Always powerful and configurable, it has now evolved into a version called Expression Engine. It has also become complex and more like a well featured content management system (CMS), than a pure blogging system. Given some programming skills and creativity you can create some amazing newspaper style sites and sites that don’t resemble blogs at all. Neat.

In contrast, Wordpress has stuck to its roots as a powerful, but easily used and configured blogging system. It can be used as a straightforward CMS if you want to, however blogs are what it is good at.

After installing pMachine, I could see what a powerful system it is and the pMachine forum is full of hacks and plugins to make it more powerful still. I just wanted to blog so it seemed pretty daunting.

Ten minutes after installing Wordpress I was writing my first blog - it’s that simple to use. It does everything that I want and I don’t (yet) feel the need to delve into its code. Wordpress is highly recommended if writing rather than programming is your aim.