UPDATE: It appears as though Dell is not selling any 64 bit operating systems with digital cable support. In order to get one that is digital cable ready you will have to find one with a 32 bit operating system. The item numbers should be the same as the ones listed below.

Back in February I decided to try and figure out how to get a CableCARD ready PC from the Dell Outlet. I had bought a few PCs from the Outlet before and had extremely good luck and got awesome deals (sometimes 50% off brand new price). I didn’t really have a scientific method at the time for finding one with necessary stuff for CableCARD use. I just found one that I really wanted and got a great deal on the system. I was under the impression that all XPS 420s manufactured after a certain point were CableCARD ready so I went ahead and made the purchase. After my purchase I went in and viewed my order and saw the following:

YN974 Module,Software,VHP32 Dimension,English,DAO,Open Cable Uni-directional Receiver $0.01

As you can see, it has the words Open Cable Uni-directional Receiver, which means OCUR, which means CableCARD ready. So I lucked out and picked the right system. The item number to the left is the item number for Windows Vista Home Premium with Digital Cable Support. So any PC you find with this item number should be CableCARD ready. The other item number for Windows Vista Home Premium at the time was DT012. Since YN974 is the CableCARD ready version of Vista, I’ve been going off of the assumption that any XPS 420 in the Outlet with DT012 is NOT CableCARD ready.

I’ve also noticed as of late that there are different item numbers for Windows Vista Home Premium on the Dell Outlet and I’m guessing this is due to the release of Service Pack 1. By doing some research I’ve discovered that N957F appears to be the Service Pack 1 version of Windows Vista Home Premium with Digital Cable Support. The other item number I found was P166F and when I did a Google search for this item number a lot of other Dell systems came up and since the XPS 420 is the only Dell system with CableCARD support that leads me to believe any XPS 420 with P166F does NOT have CableCARD support.

So in summary, YN974 and N957F appear to have CableCARD support while DT012 and P166F do NOT appear to have CableCARD support.

You may be wondering how to tell what item number an XPS 420 has. As far as I can tell, in order to determine if one has the correct item number you have to add it to your cart and then click on “Detail View” to look at the parts list and look for item number YN974 or N957F.

Also I would recommend looking for one with at least a 256MB video card. They sell them with the 128MB 2400 Pro but I’ve heard there were some incompatibility issues and they stopped shipping brand new XPS 420s with that card and CableCARD tuners.

I hope you find this information useful. If there was something that I did not cover, just let me know. Also, please post any success stories using this information on here or TGB so the information can get around.

Also, I will be posting something else shortly on some methods you can use to obtain CableCARD tuners since you can’t get them directly from the Dell Outlet.