Gawd! What a difference a clean install makes!

[Brian]

I've been putting off doing a clean install of Windows XP on my Dell Inspiron 1300 (a very nice basic laptop) ever since I got it. I had been living with the XP installation that Dell had put in, along with all their "extras". I turned off/uninstalled most of the crap and for the most part it seemed to be pretty smooth sailing.

Then three days ago, I formatted the hard drive and did a reinstall of Windows from scratch, installing the latest drivers and only the programs that I wanted in there and , Holy Crapola!, what a difference it makes. My Lord, this thing is so much smoother and snappier, starts faster, shuts down quicker and I've got a lot more free RAM than I ever did before.

So I've written a limerick for the occasion!


There once was a laptop from Dell,
That was filled with the software from Hell.
No longer a doormat,
I did a clean format.
And now my sweet laptop runs swell!

[zsaz1029]

Fantastic little limerick there! Glad the reformat turned out so well!

[k0NG0]

Huzzah! Wonderful limerick!

[John64]

Dell seems to mess up everything they touch these days as far as software goes! That is why i hate when they charge for the windows on their computers, you are paying for a useless copy of windows!

[3 of 7]

Originally Posted by John64

Dell seems to mess up everything they touch these days as far as software goes! That is why i hate when they charge for the windows on their computers, you are paying for a useless copy of windows!

Not really, just reformat using a standard windows home disc and the number on your laptop.... I'm doing an e-machine as I type this with my XP Home with SP2 and all 106?? updates slipstreamed... It makes a huge difference..And at the very worst you might have to talk to the nice person in Pakistan to activate ( I didn't this morning) It's a crapshoot LOL

[John64]

a normal disc won't accept an OEM key to my knowledge

[3 of 7]

I meant oem by "standard" I have both the oem and the XP standalone... The OEM I have will do dell, hp compaq and emachines so far....

[John64]

ok,

All OEM serials use the same pidgen.dll, where they differ is who is associated with them. I think the diferences are more for activation than the actual authentication.

[Clint_abx]

My daughter has a Dell Desk top with all the garbage on it. We don't know what some of it is. She has been doing a restore with the systems disk that came with it. It always puts all the garbage back on. Will a retail XP disk work by using her tag number on the PC?

Thanks Clint

[SRTDodge05]

The last dell i got new from them was the 8400 model desktop. It has a full xp pro cd then it had like 2 or 3 driver cds and then a cd with all this other junk on it. Now you get a dell or any other company machine all the junk is on one cd.

[TroNiXx]

I remember the first clean XP install I did on my old HP....couldnt believe it. The performance must have doubled. From that point on I was like "to hell with this proprietary crap, im building me a computer" and then I found ABXZone.

[Brian]

Originally Posted by Clint

My daughter has a Dell Desk top with all the garbage on it. We don't know what some of it is. She has been doing a restore with the systems disk that came with it. It always puts all the garbage back on. Will a retail XP disk work by using her tag number on the PC?

Thanks Clint

When I ordered my laptop, I made sure to spend the extra $10.00 to get the Operating System disc sent to me with the order. That way I would be able to do a proper clean install without any of the selected Dell junk software put in there.

The problem is that the product key for a retail XP disc is specific to a retail CD. If you try to use the product key on the Dell computer for a retail XP disc, it will tell you that it is an invalid product key during the install (because the key on the sticker on your daughter's computer is an OEM product key, that might even be specific to Dell).

If you know anybody who has a Dell computer and they ordered the Operating System disc with their computer and you were to use that CD, then it would work with the product key on the Dell's sticker.

[S.SubZero]

Actually my last two Dells, I did not opt for the original OS disc, and the one they included worked just fine and did not install extra junk, tho MCE2005 tried to install Dell's media center thing (I was able to cancel it). That's it tho. I was kind of shocked, I redid my old laptop to sell and used the Dell XP Home disc it came with, and it installed a vanilla XP Home.

I think the only difference is that the original disc option actually includes a real XP disc from Microsoft that requires the key and stuff. The OEM discs Dell provides by default do not require key entry. Kinda nice actually.

[proFeign]

first thing I do with every laptop (except thinkpad I just got) or prefab machine I get is to dust off the old win98 boot floppy:

c:\> a:
a:\> fdisk c:
a:\> format c:

first order of business with a prefab machine is to nuke out the shovelware

i like that word: shovelware. awesome.

[3 of 7]

Originally Posted by proFeign

first thing I do with every laptop (except thinkpad I just got) or prefab machine I get is to dust off the old win98 boot floppy:

c:\> a:
a:\> fdisk c:
a:\> format c:

first order of business with a prefab machine is to nuke out the shovelware

i like that word: shovelware. awesome.

Why don't you just do your partitioning/formating when you install XP?