I’ve been slowly saving up for a new PC, and ordering the parts one by one, mostly from bulk sellers on Lowyat forums.

Nowadays the greatest proportion of the money you spend on the computer is ideally the monitor. Prices have been slowly going down, but the average screen size has gone up - 22″ LCD monitors are basically today what 17″ CRTs were 10 years back.

So you can imagine that I’ve been doing a lot of price and product comparison before shelling out my cash.

One of the manufacturers that I’ve been considering is Dell - they make practical, affordable monitors.

What’s confusing though is how they come up with their online discount schemes. It’s worse than the stock market, the way their prices change.

Something is seriously fishy about their new product line though, specifically their new 22″, the SP2208WFP.

I was checking out the site today because I’d heard of their new 24″ model. I noticed that the SP2208WFP was marked as “RM440 off”.

Sounds like an incredible deal for a new model, right?

The thing is that I’ve been visiting Dell’s site regularly, so the prices have stuck in my mind. I distinctly remember that the price when it was first introduced was also RM1,159.

I tried looking to Google Cache for an old copy of the page, but couldn’t find it at first. After much digging however I found a cached copy of the Singapore Dell page.

Firstly, what the SG Dell site looked like then (the cache retrieval date is 1st November ):

This is what it looks like now (advertising “$70 off” on the unit):

Something’s wrong here… I hope they don’t have a dartboard they use to decide the “discount” on their units.

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