Dell this afternoon introduced a rare variant on its home notebooks. The Inspiron 1525 Mike Ming Editions each get graffiti-influenced artwork by their Brooklyn-based namesake on the outer lid, personalizing the systems beyond the solid colors and stock prints that are normally available for the 15.4-inch notebooks. Regardless of the trim level, users can either pick from the monochrome-effect "Bunch O Surfers" or the multicolored "Sea Sky."

The Texas PC maker ships the visually upgraded 1525 in two different performance grades. A stock model at $699 ships with a basic 1.73GHz Pentium dual-core, 3GB of RAM, and a 160GB hard disk; a special Extreme edition at $799 boosts the CPU up to a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo and doubles the hard drive space to 320GB. Either version can be custom-ordered as of today and ships within the next two weeks.