Hi team

Firstly - this is about a PC - but I'm sure the lessons apply just as much to a notebook.

I've just bought a new PC for home - a Dell 9150 with Windows MCE 2005, 2 x 250Gb HDDs, 2 Gb RAM. My previous experience with Dell PCs is that they ship with heaps of bloatware, so I'm thinking about formatting the primary HDD and reinstalling the OS, followed by Firewall, Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware then apps.

Any tips on getting the best performance would be appreciated - should I have a separate 20Gb partition for the OS, format NTFS, what size page file (and where) and so on.

We do intend at some stage to use this for home video, HD PVR and movie purposes (Mrs willyroo likes the Philips 37PF9731 1,920 x 1,080 LCD), which I can imagine will be a big workload...

You help (as always) greatly appreciated!

To be honest I'd simply go to add/remove programs and remove what you don't want. There isn't all that much crap on these machines, at least not as much as on a Vaio or Gateway. The time you'd need to spend on getting all the drivers together just isn't worth a total reformat, then adding all the SP's and other tweaks.

With 2Gb of ram your pagefile isn't important, unless you have a lot of lame apps with memory leaks you won't need to be paging anyway.

As for the workload of the monitor; all the work will be done by the GDI anyway.

If you really want to boost things then you could always add some ram. I assume the drives are SATA?

You're better off removing the programs as Scott suggested, and then reconfiguring the services and startup programs you don't need and turning them off. Remove MSN messenger, turn off the indexing service, etc.

-David

Thanks - that will make life easier.
The drives are SATA 3...

FYI .. for services configuration information, I used to use black vipers web site, but his stuff is gone. Major Geeks reproduced most of it here:

http://majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=12

I don't use his suggestions verbatim, but more as a guide. The information is good, but you have to decide which suggestions you want to follow and which you don't. Each service is clickable, so you can read more about it and then decide if you want it or not. One thing you might want to consider is keeping the system restore service around, and taking a restore point before messing with any of this stuff.

-David

Re: the paging file and the OS, unless they are on a different physical disk drive putting them on a different partition doesn't do anything for you.

Thanks - makes for interesting (if long!) reading. I'll certainly take the earlier advice and remove "stuff" and reconfigure...

Much appreciated

My Dell 9150 Review

I uninstalled only as the others have suggested and I'm pleased with the purchase. ^ ^

They do need to put in more USB ports stock though and the Dell blog still has not acknowledged this issue sufficiently.

Holley molley - my old 8100 (5 years old) has 768 Mb (2 x 128Mb + 2 x 256Mb) of the 800 MHz RD-RAM - I might be better to sell the RAM separately!!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=170004170232

Reinstalling may or may not help. Often Dell will ship a restore CD and not an actual licensed Windows CD. It basically screws people who buy Dell. In such a case, reinstalling would reinstall that bloatware.

I have an IBM Thinkpad T42 and recently decided to replace the original HDD with a newer and faster 100GB 7200rpm HDD. I used the 8 (I believe) restore CD's I previously made to restore the Windows XP Pro OS. I dont believe I had to remove the usual bloatware that originally came with the system. BTW the T42 runs faster and quieter.

MisterNice

Just a quick update - the "crap" got to me.

Have just done a clean install (delete partition, reformat etc). It now runs much better.

Found a small issue tho - the screensaver didn't work. Turns out (after much searching, gnashing and wailing etc) that the MS wireless keyboard sometimes causes this.

Disabled "ehtray.exe" on startup and all is well.

I agree with everyone on here. DON'T REFORMAT. It will be a nightmare to get your nice new computer working again.

I wouldn't always agree with this. If you know what you are doing, it is very easy to get it up and running.
I bought a Dell a few months back and did a complete rebuild with a "Standard" install disc for XP. I just copied all of the Dell drivers and SATA drivers to a disc before the format and the install went fine.
Haven't had any problems.