If you have a corporate account with Dell, they provide the web site premier.dell.com for account management and ordering, or at least contract pricing. I received an email recently imploring me to check out all its new features. I did, and there were none that I could find that were less than a few months old, but as the email pretended to come from my account rep, I thought I'd email back and make a few ... feature requests of my own. And since I'm enjoying my curmudgeonly mood today, you all get to read it too:

* Make it so that it's fast enough to convince me that it isn't being powered by an 80-year-old invalid transcribing the web pages onto my computer by tapping it out on a telegraph. It really is slow. Painfully slow. I frequently end up doing research on the main Dell site and then duplicate a configuration on the premier site for the sole reason of having an eQuote of it.

* I noticed last night that I couldn't combine pieces of two eQuotes into a new eQuote. That is, I had one quote with a few laptops I'm looking at ordering, and another with a series of desktops I was deciding between. I decided on one of the desktops and wanted to create a new quote by copying the laptops in the first quote and the one desktop in the other quote to a new quote without having to go through the customization process again. I think the simplest way to do this would be to have a "copy eQuote to cart" option somewhere. If there already is one, I couldn't find it. (By the way, if all of those eQuotes are spamming you or someone else, and there's some other way to save a cart -- that is, if I'm using the eQuote feature improperly -- let me know.)

* I don't really care about your preconfigured models; they just muddy the waters. Obviously, there has to be a default configuration, but if I, for example, go to the workstations page and search for "Vista with Downgrade to XP" and "Precision Workstations", I get 14 results over two pages, of which five are different T7500 configurations, and there are doubles of several other models. If I don't restrict the OS, I get 28 total results over three pages. You only actually have six distinct models. In addition, the descriptions don't tell me what is different about them. All but one have the exact same description, with the remaining one only adding the term "64" under the OS listing, despite the title of one of the others claiming "64 bit". In addition, if I go to the extended "compare" page, I still might not see a difference. For example, it doesn't show any difference between the T7500 models beyond the OS difference I just mentioned. Yes, some of the titles indicate "Dual Processor" and/or "64 Bit", but I'm not sure I can trust the titles. (Reason further down.)

* The model search is almost useless. You pretty much have to already know which model you want, in which case, why not just have a list of models? The model summaries in the search results page don't give enough information to make a decision. In particular, they tend to show things that can be changed on the customization page, not the things that really make the models distinct. I would suggest that the search options include model-specific features, not model categories and names. I would like to be able to search for things like "tower workstation, dual E5540 CPUs, 16GB RAM, 4 hard drives" and have it show me all the models that can be configured with those options. In addition, this would make the arbitrary distinction between desktops and workstations (and maybe even servers) moot, which would be helpful. Laptops are distinct enough that it might make sense to keep them separate. (Not that you do so now; there are laptops in the workstations category.) And, combining this with the multiple preconfigurations complaint above, the default configuration doesn't need to match all of the search requests; it just needs those options to exist. It would be nicer if it knew they could exist in combination, but, even if not, that would be a huge improvement. For an example of a very useful search engine, check out NewEgg's Power Search. For example:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/PowerSearch.aspx?N=2032280010&SubCategory=10&GASearch=3

Even their basic "Guided" search is far more powerful than your only one. Given, they don't have configurable models, but it really shouldn't be that much more difficult.

* Sometimes the search doesn't even actually work correctly. Ordering by "price low to high", for example, doesn't order the results by price. Remember the five T7500s from above? If I check the "T7500" checkbox, I only get four results; one of them goes missing. Oh, I see why now. One of them has the title of "T7500", but is actually a T5500. Then again, one of the actual T7500s is a "Preision" T7500, without the "c". This is why I said above that I don't know if I can trust the models' titles.

* There are some things that can only be configured with the correct base model choice. If I know that I want to configure, for example, an OptiPlex 360, you show me four default configurations: Desktop, Minitower, Desktop N-series, Minitower N-series. I can kind of understand the desktop vs. minitower (though, if it's going to be that way, I don't understand why they don't have separate model numbers), but the difference between N-series and not-N-series is just the operating system. You already have a configuration option for OS; why not just include the N-series' FreeDOS there? I understand that it might restrict some options, but you already have option dependencies; why should this one be any different? This should apply to all of the other OS choices, too. Sometimes different OSes are split out to different base models and sometimes they aren't. At least your "search" will deal with that option. And some models (the T610, for example) can be configured to have one or two processors; others (the T7500, for example) require that you choose the right base model. If the single-processor version doesn't have a second CPU socket, it shouldn't be the same model number. If it does, why isn't it just a configuration option?

* The "E-Quotes" link that exists on many of the "My Premier" pages often just takes me back to the Premier home page.

* The "Account Team" gadget on "My Premier" still shows my "General Contact" as my old Dell rep, who was laid off months ago.

* "My Systems & Peripherals" should be a prominent link. But if I go to premier.dell.com, the fastest way I can figure to get there is "My Premier" (which takes *forever* to load) -> "Select a different product" -> "View and Edit My Systems List". In addition, if and when you make the "My Premier" page faster than molasses in winter, there should be a "My Systems" gadget.

* On the "My Systems & Peripherals" page, there is a column for "System Description". If I import a list using the "Import Systems & Peripherals", I can have that field set to the hostnames I use for my computers here, like "rd-wl-faulk". If, however, I try to edit that field directly from the page and I try to use a hyphen, it tells me "The field does not accept any special characters. Please try again." and refuses to let me change it. Even if it already contains a hyphen. Even if I accidentally clicked on the field and didn't change anything. Also, there's no way to cancel editing that field without reloading or navigating away from that page.

* Oh, and this is probably outside your sphere of influence, the tech support chat only works under Firefox about one in every ten tries.