I helped a longtime occasional client with the setup of an XPS 600 within the last month - she'd been on Windows 98 about 2 years longer than she should have been, so it was ripe for her to upgrade.  \n\nPhysically, the machine is pretty imposing - it's slightly taller than the standard Optiplex or Dimension tower, and taller than the minitowers you find in most stores (CompUSA, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.) but the extra size does provide a lot of space for internal devices, many of which you can have preinstalled and configured by Dell.  It's also pretty wide - wider than her old tower by 2-3 inches.  \n\nBecause my client wanted several measures of reliability and backup, we had the system preconfigured with a mirrored RAID array (2x250GB HDs), a DVD+/-RW drive for ad hoc backups, and an external harddrive for scheduled backups that can backup the entire drive.  Since she also wanted to be able to do graphics editing in the future, we got the machine with a GeForce 6800 graphics card (leaving open the option to add a second card in SLI configuration at a later date, if needed, though if they'd offered the option earlier, I would have recommended the 7800 GTX) and got a good 5.1 sound card installed as well (hooked up to old speakers, but WTF - it's her money) and 2GB RAM, with room to go up to 4GB if needed.\n\nFor external expansion, it comes with 8 USB 2.0 ports, and 3(?) firewire ports.  6 of the USB ports are in the back, with 2 firewire, while 3 are in front, behind a small panel.  We actually used most of the USB ports while setting up most of her peripherals, but you can always add a USB 2.0 high speed hub if you have that many additional devices.    If you have older keyboards and/or mice you're fond of that are PS/2, the machine does have ports for those as well.   (My client is still using a 10-year old keyboard from her old 486 PC that ran Windows 95.  I think it's Dorian Grey's keyboard, and has a printout of itself aging in a closet somewhere.)  If you have an old parallel printer though, it does NOT have a parallel port, so you'll need a parallel to USB cable or you'll need to order a parallel port card.\n\nFrom a software standpoint, the machine is very nice to use - everything runs very smoothly (in part thanks to the dual core CPU) with the only hiccup being AOL, which was preinstalled, but still has problems even in version 9.0 with playing well with Internet Explorer, since AOL uses the IE kernel for its own browsing component - running the two at the same time caused problems.\n\nAll in old, I'd say this is an excellent PC, competitive with other high end PCs from boutique manufacturers.  Where it falls short is the ability to get Dell on the phone - even with "a separate queue just for XPS users", we were on hold for close to an hour without ever speaking with a representative when trying to find out whether the shipped PC actually matched the original specs fro when the PC was ordered through the website.  Smaller PC vendors, such as Falcon-Northwest, VoodooPC, Monarch, and ABS are much better about being responsive to customers after the sale than Dell was here.  Aside from that, it's an excellent PC.
How good are Dell XPS desktops?