No, an OS re-install is not something I’d have considered. After many horrors & nightmares in the Win 3.1 days in which I lost virtually every file I had, I’d be very slow to mess with the OS. I’m just glad it works as much as it does to be honest.

I might try a re-install, although the thoughts of losing all my settings & configs makes me shiver !!!

I have had several Dells over the last few years (700m and XPS M140) after using an IBM. I have never had a problem but the color tends to wear off the wrist pad quite quickly.

My 700m keyboard started acting up two weeks ago (18 months old). I first noticed it when I could not type the letter "T". I called Dell, and while testing it repetitively typed "5", and gave me all sorts of beeping on startup. I needed a new keyboard. I have to say I was not impressed with any of the folks I dealt with in India. The first person said a tech would be out with a new keyboard, only to be followed by a call the next day at 7 in the morning that they would ship me one to self install (I asked that they send it to my dad as I was in NYC last week). The keyboard didn't show up.

I came home last weekend and called again. Dell told me the tech had my keyboard and had tried unsuccessfully to contact me, and would try again Monday. Monday came and went. I called Tuesday, and was assured the tech would call me. Tuesday came and went. I called Wednesday, got customer service in Canada this time, and had a new keyboard a few hours later. For some reason the tech was trying to call my dad, even though Dell had my home and cell numbers. I'm glad I wasn't a business customer that actually needed this laptop for work.

Yeah, I remember fondly the Windows ME days of re-booting every time I opened another app... screw new OS's! Power to the people!

I find putting the data files on a separate partition from the OS is a huge timesaver when backing up as I like to delete the OS partition when reinstalling the OS, not just reinstalling over it.

With Dell customer support, you have to keep in mind the time zone difference in India vs. where you are.

To follow up, I bought the Dell, a Latitude D820. Pretty happy with it, a couple of small problems to call about but no biggie.

Here's a tip for anyone buying a new machine. My laptop, like most machines with an operating system installed, came with only one drive partition, meaning I had a whacking great 100gb C: drive. That is a really boneheaded way to run a computer for a couple of reasons (1. data organization 2. inability to format and reinstall a corrupted operating system without blowing away everything on the machine).

Partition Magic is software that will, for a price, split that into two or more logical drives (two or more drive letters on one physical hard drive.)

I went the open source route. Open source, for those unfamiliar, is software that anyone can download and use for free, legitimately. I used Gnome Partition Editor, http://gparted.sourceforge.net. Downloaded the LiveCD version in .iso format and used my laptop's installed Roxio software to burn it onto a CD. Booted off the CD, and in abut 6 minutes I had C: and D: drives. Easy and free.

Try to do this before you install software and data on the laptop, but if you can't, don't do this until you've backed up your data.

Cheers,

Rob

This was exactly what happened to me and service call for my Dell desktop. CPU fried, called, tech would come out, did not, called again, they will ship, did not, finally started screaming, so they sent out two CPUs . One went in the computer and the other on eBay

We just ordered a Dell Laptop. My old Inspiron 8200 worked great for 4 years. I hope the new one works as well as the old one.l

I've never really understood the whole partitioning of the hard drive thing. Do you really reinstall your OS that frequently? I use XP at work and OS X at home, and haven't reinstalled in years.

As far as data organization, now that there's good search tools available, I've really stopped worrying about it. Computers are much better at organizing/finding than people are. Let the computer do its job.

Are you serious? What are you doing to your machines?

This desktop in the first PC w/ XP that I haven't been doing the reinstall thing. It's working ok. My laptop I do the reinstall every 6 months. I used that thing to death and the performance does seem to degrade. After each reformat /reinstall it runs faster.

I've had the same experiance with the Bluetooth module. Also, my system came with 4GB of RAM, but only 3GB are usable as the BIOS only supports that much!

Wow. The only time I've messed with any installation of the OS is when upgrading, about once every 1.5 years. I haven't done an OS reinstall since OS 8 or 9. (6 years)

I do have to shut down/restart the computer about once every couple of months or so, when an OS update is available. Otherwise, my laptop stays on or sleeps.

It gets about 14-16 hours' use daily with about 10-12 applications open at any time, heaviest burdens coming from Excel, Mail, SAP Gui, Word, Keynote, and Firefox. It's a 1.5-2 year-old Powerbook 1.67 GHz.

A couple of responses were wondering why one would need to re-install an OS except in rare circumstances.

Most people wouldn't need to, but If you abuse your OS like I sometimes do, installing programs and never using them or uninstalling software incompletely, your system will degrade over time.

I rarely rebuild my system, maybe once in the lifecycle of a PC, if that. But if something goes badly wrong and you can't boot your system or you really need to re-install, life is going to be a lot easier if you can format and reinstall on the C: drive rather than trying to figure out how to get the data off.

It's not really a matter of doing it very often, but of being ready if the need arises. I also like to just backup my D: drive and ignore the C: drive. Makes backups simpler.