In case you haven't seen it on Engadget (or even if you have), today's the day you can order an XPS 420.

It's built for performance and expandability. If you spend your time creating video, this thing can make short work of any kind of video content—whether you make short clips that you upload to YouTube or you produce video in high definition.  

Besides video creation, this thing makes a great multimedia server that can store and serve all you digital music, photos, videos and recorded TV content in one place.

Hardwire-wise, this thing rocks: X38 chipset, processor support up to Intel's QX6850, video card options like ATI's 2400 PRO and NVIDIA's 8800GTX, and up to 3TB of storage. If you want to record or watch over-the-air high definition (or standard definition) TV, we offer the ATI 650 PRO combo TV tuner card as an option.

Note: 10/25—Direct2Dell reader Weeva correctly made the point that our current high-def TV tuner card only supports over-the-air HD, not Digital Cable or satellite high definition. LM

Update: 12/9—I just published a follow-on blog post that explains that we started offering the digital cable TV tuner on Friday last week. LM

Beyond that, it's our first product to feature the XPS MiniView screen, which is a small LCD screen (about 2 x 3in) integrated on the top of the chassis.  The display supports a 320 x 240 resolution, and can be used to display calendar information, system details, and navigate through photos and digital music. MiniView is compatible with Microsoft's SideShow and supported third-party Gadgets, so users can customize the display for other information like RSS feeds, news, stock tickers and more.

If you are a person who likes to capture video and take it with you, the Dell Xcelerator is a cool option. It can be used to transcode recorded video from the original format to another so it can be played on a portable device. Beyond that, since it does the processing work on its own, the Xcelerator takes much of the burden off the processor, and makes the process faster than with just the CPU alone.

We're also introducing the SP2008WFP 20" widescreen display. It features a maximum resolution of 1680x1050, a 2ms response time, and HDCP through its DVI input. It's also our first flat panel to feature an integrated 2-megapixel webcam that can capture resolution up to 1600 x 1200.

In terms of software, the XPS 420 comes with Adobe Elements Studio, which is full versions of these three Adobe applications:

• Premiere Elements 4—For video editing
• Photoshop Elements 6—For digital photo organization and editing
• SoundBooth CS3—For audio editing and sound design

In this video, Michael Fahy from the XPS Product team covers a lot of ground. He touches on our design approach, SideShow, the Bluetooth media card reader, the Dell Xcelerator option, the Adobe software suite, the new display with the integrated webcam, and more.

I wanted to take a minute to remind folks that the XPS 700 Motherboard Exchange Program will expire on Saturday, October 13.

This means that all XPS 700 or 710 customers who want to participate in the program must submit orders on or before 11:59pm Central Time on Saturday, October 13.

As a reminder, the link for the XPS 700 Motherboard Exchange Program is:

www.XPSUpgradeProgramDell.com

Over the past few months, our focus with Ubuntu 7.10 has revolved primarily around hardware functionality and stability on the systems we plan to support. This has involved a great deal of testing, identifying and troubleshooting bugs, and working with the Ubuntu community to get those bugs fixed in the OS. In particular, much of our testing has focused on the following areas: graphics (laptop native resolution support, monitor compatibility), wired/wireless networking, suspend/hibernate, laptop webcams, audio, and touchpad mouse scrolling, to name a few. We have also focused on performing OS upgrade testing, to make sure the OS upgrade process is as smooth as possible for Dell customers. As always, our goal is to have Ubuntu 7.10 "just work" when installing it on supported hardware, and I think customers will have a very good experience using the OS on our supported hardware.

We have created a new Ubuntu 7.10 page on our wiki, and have begun updating it with information. After Ubuntu 7.10 is available on Thursday, please review the content on this page before updating your operating system from 7.04 to 7.10. For additional information and help, please check the Dell Desktop Linux mailing list, the Dell Linux Forum, or the Ubuntu/Dell forum.

In addition to all of our technical work, the team has also been spending a lot of time talking to customers, reading community and media reviews, sorting through Dell Ideastorm postings, and reviewing the Dell and Ubuntu Linux forums, in order to learn how we can improve our Ubuntu Linux offerings. We have incorporated much of that information into shaping our test plans, bug fixing efforts, and product plans, and we think our customers will be pleased with the progress we have made.

We'll provide more information soon on those product plans around Ubuntu 7.10, including supported systems, supported hardware features, availability timeframe, and countries. Please stay tuned.

Today at the Gartner IT Symposium, one of the products we launched is our On-Demand Desktop Streaming solution for customers in the United States.

Essentially, it is a Dell-tested and validated solution where operating systems, applications and data are streamed to groups of diskless desktops from a shared PowerEdge 2950 server over a Gigiabit Ethernet network.

The client portion of the solution is based on OptiPlex 745 or 755 systems. Besides not having a hard drive, these clients have all components that are in a typical PC—a processor, memory, on-board graphics, etc. This means that end users can expect similar performance that they would get on a local PC.

Because the OS, application data, user-level information and data files reside in the data center, IT adminstrators can easily manage client hardware and image files from one place. 

Bharath Vasudevan and Aaron Prince from the Solutions Engineering team walk you a demo of a 100-client setup and show this differs from some of the Blade PC solutions being offered by some of our competitors.

We're not a solution intended for everyone—it's for specific environments for medium and large commercial and institutional customers. The On-Demand Desktop Streaming solution is the first in a series of products that will be part of our standards-based Flexible Computing Solutions strategy.

As some of you may already know, Jeff Jarvis spent a day at Dell a couple of weeks ago to write a BusinessWeek story. He spent some time with Michael Dell, and captured a vlog that's part of the that story and also part of his post on Buzzmachine.

Beyond that, he spent time with other execs Dick Hunter, Mark Jarvis, Manish Mehta and members of our digital media team as well. Of course, we'd be crazy not to be happy with the end result.

I got a chance to interview Jeff near the end of the day, and here is the vlog that resulted.

There's a lot of folks here at Dell doing the work that Jeff praises us for. I'm personally humbled to be part of it. But I'm also aware that Jeff himself rightfully questions whether or not this is the end of Dell Hell. I'll be the first to admit that we're at the beginning of a long-term turnaround in regards to improving Customer Service in the Uniited States and beyond.

Without a doubt, we're working hard to write the next chapter.