With its Q3 sales down 3% and demand fearfully thin, Dell is tearing a page out of Microsoft's book and is going to offer U.S. businesses 0% financing.

It's focusing on large corporations and institutions but some smaller shops should also qualify.

Guess it's glad it decided to keep that financing arm it was thinking of selling off earlier this year.

It's also got some deferred payment plans and schemes to let paying customers exchange what they lease now for the latest thing at the end of term.

Dell's also cutting prices on some of its Latitude E-series laptops and across its PowerEdge servers.

The Latitude E6400, for instance, has been cut 17% or $500 and its low-end Opteron 2350-based T605 server has been trimmed 20% or $300. Prices on server memory have been reduced by up to 40%.