I’ve always liked all-in-one PCs, having bought my first back in 2000 from Gateway. I’m considering getting a Dell XPS 27 with the touch screen so that I can try out Windows 8 (don’t worry, I am prepared for Windows 8 to suck! Frankly I haven’t found any new Microsoft features since Windows XP that I thought were useful). Dell seems to make a pretty good product for around $2000 (includes 8 GB of RAM and a 2 TB hard drive for video editing/storage). What I can’t figure out is why there is no SSD cache or accelerator available from Dell or indeed why this isn’t standard. I bought a $1000 17″ laptop from HP last summer and, due to its 32 GB SSD accelerator, it boots just about as fast as a fully SSD-based machine yet has a huge capacity for storing video and the accelerator was only about a $50 option (based on SSD accelerators on amazon.com the price seems to be about the same today).

If everyone hates computers that are slow to boot, why hasn’t the SSD accelerator idea caught on as a standard feature?

[Anticipating that the Apple fan club would chime in with some derision… I priced a similar configuration over at Apple and found that $2549 is the price for a 27″ all-in-one with similar CPU, memory, and hard drive capacity. But the Apple product does not have a touch screen so really there is no direct comparison. Anyway, it would be good if people could confine comments to the question of why this $50 item is not in every personal computer rather than the question of how anyone could be stupid enough to buy a non-Apple product.]

Update 10/20/2012: Dell just added a $2500 “monster” config for the XPS 27. It has a 32 GB SSD accelerator (in front of a 2 TB conventional hard drive), 16 GB of RAM, and a Blu-ray drive. That still does leave the question of why don’t they offer this as an option on their $1000+ PCs. Almost every magazine review seems to indicate that the SSD accelerator improves system performance more than anything comparably priced.