I REALLY thought that Dell had something going a few years ago with their computers! Well... after working on several from my friends over the past year or so... YUCK! You could not pay me to have one! The most recent is an older friend who ordered from Dell a $700.00 media center. From the FIRST day he started logging b.s.o.d.'s, freezes, and crashes. He logged more than 145 b.s.o.d.'s in 6 weeks! Not to mention the other problems mentioned! He had bad memory too! I sent him several memory test files, Failed ALL of them! Dell's answer (from India of course!) was to restore, try this, try that, but NOTHING fixed it! He did some searching around on the hard drive, found that it was a "Media Center Software Upgrade" from about 5 months earlier! Also the "media center" picture reader hardware that goes where the floppy disk is normally installed... isn't even there! Nowhere to be found in or on the machine! He does have a black floppy drive there instead!!! They finally admitted after nearly 6 weeks of this that he has a re-furbished machine! He found a different person's account and music and other personal files on the hard drive! Dell did not EVEN format the machine before selling it to him! They wanted to REPAIR NOT REPLACE it!
Now, from my own personal experience, several friends have the dell dimension 4400. The dell's will NOT accept windows xp service pack 2! Any possible way of doing this simply will not work! A clean install of xp sp2 just loops and reboots the machines! They all will take either pro or home any combination of xp, both non service pack and service pack 1 and 1a! But ALL of them crash and loop, (reboot eternally) EVERY single time sp2 is put on them! Dell does not address this at all on their website anywhere that I can find! Two other friends with dell dimension 4400's have the exact same 2 problems! Wav files and mp3's and music, sound, etc... is a hyper speed! It sounds like a tape or record being played at high speed! Anyway, I guess you get the point! I needed to vent!

stanton, ke4pkb