The following comments may seem a bit narrowly focused- but we bought this computer expressly as the core of a dedicated Adobe Premiere / Pinnacle DV500 desktop video editing system. This is, admittedly, a specialized application that requires a different approach to setup than what one might typically use in the home or office. So, these comments may not be applicable to those types of users or situations.

As anyone who has used one knows, desktop video editing computers really need to be dedicated entirely to that purpose. This is because bandwidth-intensive video editing applications often use up all available system resources (especially during rendering and streaming)and you don't want anything else chewing up bandwidth or CPU cycles. In order to have a reliable and relatively crash-free Dell 4100 setup, all of the usual pre-installed and extraneous Microsoft and AOL bloatware, networking, start-up widgets, and so forth, need to be eliminated.

Fortunately, Microsoft anticipated this need, and provides a handy application called msconfig (invoked on the "run" command line) that allows you to selectively prevent all that crap from loading at startup time! This tool, when used carefully and iteratively, lets you keep over 80% of system resources available for use by the video editing application (Adobe Premiere in our case).

In addition, most PC-based desktop video editing setups require the use of additional dedicated hardware to support S-video analog or 1394 Firewire digital capture, rendering, and output to and from outboard VTR's and cameras. This activity is both ATA bus- and CPU intensive.

The manufacturers of these specialized capture boards (like the Pinnacle DV-500) insist that certain dedicated system resources like high-order IRQ's be "hardwired" to the board/slot position, in order to guarantee seamless video transfers without glitches. This is where the Dell 4100 falls on its face a bit.

The Phoenix or Award bios commonly used in such OEM motherboards as the ASUS, give you the ability to assign certain IRQ's to specific slots, before Windows gets its hands on them. Unfortunately the crippled bios that comes with the 4100 doesn't support this functionality. Moreover, the commonly used stunt of installing the add-on board right next to the built-in graphics board, doesn't have any effect on assigned IRQ's in the Dell. No matter what I did, the Pinnacle board would end up on IRQ 3 or 5, instead of 9,10,or 11 where it belonged. After pulling my hair out for several days trying to figure out a decent solution to this problem (see photo), I finally set up the Device Manager to reserve IRQ's 3 and 5 from use by ANY device (thus losing them entirely) and thereby forced the Pinnacle onto IRQ 10. This was also where the USB keyboard was located- so I had to remove it and replace it with a conventional keyboard, to provide the dedicated IRQ that the Pinnacle needs. This is clearly a meat-axe solution, but the dumbed-down 4100 bios forces you into this compromise.

Another problem- the sound card suddenly failed after a few hours use. This was bad enough, but the Dell Customer Service types forced me to repeatedly run through a series of inane diagnostics before finally accepting my diagnosis and issuing an RMA. After I complained about the amount of my time this was wasting, they admitted that their policy did not allow them to take the customer's level of technical sophistication into account (!), but that everyone had to go through this mind-numbing routine in order to receive the longed-for RMA.

The fan noise is also annoying, but easily reduced by removing two of the snap-on attachments, and allowing the plastic housing to sit loose on the sheet metal. The cooling is unaffected by this, but the noise went down by at least 10 db.

I do have to say that, once we got done wrestling with these problems (and several others that were entirely a Pinnacle issue) the system has settled down and is doing a very good job supporting our editing of a 56 minute long PBS project. The performance, especially at the price, is more than adequate and the Dell 15" flatpanel LCD monitor is a real delight.



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 2000
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 701-800
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50