Status: up and running

[Zaphod Q. IX]

My new computer got delivered at 2:30 p.m. today. Unfortunately, I had to work at 4 p.m. Thanks to the idiots I work with, I did not get home until 1 a.m. :angry:

I am posting this using the new computer and all I have to say is...

WOW!

I haven't even had time to scratch the surface, nor will I tonight, but I am impressed with this thing. I love Vista. I love Dell. I definitely love my 19" flatscreen monitor. Everything is HUGE on this thing. :D

The best advice I've gotten so far is to re-format to remove bloatware, which I plan on doing. Anyone else got advice? And what is this "User Access Control" crap? I'm disabling that, as soon as I get my speakers working. ;)

[phattonez]

User Access Control is meant to annoy you, as we've established here.

Get it off your computer while you still can. I wish I had Vista on my laptop, but I'm pretty much stuck with it now.

[Zaphod Q. IX]

Yeah, I read something about that "UAC" crap. Disabled now. :D
Having an issue with my subwoofer not being loud enough, but other than that, I am LOVING my new computer. It's so fast.

Going from a 500 mhz 20 gig box to this monstrously huge computer is like trading in a 1985 honda civic for a 2008 porche. I think I may faint from the excitement.

Ugh. The bloatware has got to go. Macafee has installed itself, even though I told it not to. :|

I think I may reformat tomorrow.

[Gerudo]

i disabled that UAC garbage because i was tired of getting prompted for running any damn thing on my laptop.

and yeah, i did lots of uninstalling when after i set this thing up. so its almost bare bones, but not quite. Vista is more annoying, but i dont wanna bother downgrading to XP on a machine meant for vista.

i cant say i recommend formatting your new machine, but thats just me...

glad you got your '2008 porche', zaph. ;p

[AlphaDawg]

I think Dells now ship with a bloatware removal program installed. Check to see if it's there somewhere.

Failing that, reformat, and downgrade to XP if you can and want to. The 530 series works just fine with XP as far as I know... you can check support.dell.com using your service tag beforehand to make sure XP drivers are available. Make sure to burn them to a CD (or save them to a flash drive) because XP won't recognize your network hardware. Also make sure you don't erase the partition Dell creates for diagnostic programs (if you downgrade to XP this should be easy to spot and avoid).

[Zaphod Q. IX]

I've removed most of the crap that I don't want and replaced it with crap that I do want.

Just went through and did it manually.

This is one of the most beautiful images I've ever seen. For those of you not familiar with the program, this is a a spacemonger (http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/)snapshot of my HD...
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh157/foosballpatriot/spacemonger5242008.jpg
All that free space, waiting for me to fill it. Oh, the possibilities... :sb:

Did I mention that I love my new computer?
EDIT: Just to see what would happen, I ran Windows Media Player, Quicktime, and Netflix Movie Viewer all at the same time. All that I accomplished was a headache from trying to watch 3 things at once. No slowdown.

[Breaker]

I think Dells now ship with a bloatware removal program installed. Check to see if it's there somewhere.

Failing that, reformat, and downgrade to XP if you can and want to. The 530 series works just fine with XP as far as I know... you can check support.dell.com using your service tag beforehand to make sure XP drivers are available. Make sure to burn them to a CD (or save them to a flash drive) because XP won't recognize your network hardware. Also make sure you don't erase the partition Dell creates for diagnostic programs (if you downgrade to XP this should be easy to spot and avoid).

Why would you want to do something like that? There is absolutely nothing wrong with Vista if you have a system that can handle it. I just bought a brand new Dell laptop with Vista pre-installed (through their business site, so no bloatware of any kind) and it's running amazingly.

[AlphaDawg]

Why would you want to do something like that? There is absolutely nothing wrong with Vista if you have a system that can handle it. I just bought a brand new Dell laptop with Vista pre-installed (through their business site, so no bloatware of any kind) and it's running amazingly.Most of the Dells I worked on with Vista ran like absolute garbage. It could have been due to the bloatware, or it could have been because when Vista first came pre-installed Dell still shipped systems with only 512 MB of RAM, or some combination of the two.

If you can take all the bloatware off and the system runs great, stick with Vista, by all means. If you can get a Dell with no bloatware at all, even better!

[Starkist]

Where I used to work we would sell Acer laptops. Now the minimum system requirements for Vista included 512MB RAM. These laptops had 512. Of course, since they had an onboard video adapter, that would suck up around 128MB of that RAM.

Fail.

[Zaphod Q. IX]

I took Breaker's advice on RAM and got 2gb. This machine is running so well, it's scary. I am not sure I even want to keep my old computer anymore, except as a learning tool for my two year old.

[Shazza Dani]

I've removed most of the crap that I don't want and replaced it with crap that I do want.

Just went through and did it manually.

This is one of the most beautiful images I've ever seen. For those of you not familiar with the program, this is a a spacemonger (http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/)snapshot of my HD...
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh157/foosballpatriot/spacemonger5242008.jpg
All that free space, waiting for me to fill it. Oh, the possibilities... :sb:


Nice. I reformatted my laptop a few days ago and here's how it looks:
http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/2070/myharddrive1tq6.png

I think it's funny that my biggest portion is music. That's because I backed up all my mp3s before reformatting. =]