Dell Owners, 9300 inspirons especially

GiRaff3

GiRaff3

Gawd
Joined
Sep 7, 2003
Messages
599
i have read around and learned a couple of things. first off, dell sends the laptop, one partition of the hard drive, lots of junk. also, they do not send you a copy of the OS you purchased with it (think i got either xp home or media edition or whatever), but instead they give you recovery disks.

i have never run a computer with one partition, that is unacceptable to me. can i format, put in a regular xp cd i have around, partition the drive, then use their recovery cd or whatever to install on the first partition i made?

what have all of you done to get your partitions? start from scratch? please let me know. my 9300 will be here weds next week or so!
 
GiRaff3 said:
dell sends the laptop, one partition of the hard drive, lots of junk. also, they do not send you a copy of the OS you purchased with it (think i got either xp home or media edition or whatever), but instead they give you recovery disks.
Click to expand...

all true

GiRaff3 said:
can i format, put in a regular xp cd i have around, partition the drive, then use their recovery cd or whatever to install on the first partition i made?
Click to expand...

Well you can definitely format, repartition, and install from your own XP CD. I don't know about using the recovery disk at that point though, might still work. But why bother?

GiRaff3 said:
what have all of you done to get your partitions? start from scratch?
Click to expand...

I left mine alone for 3 months, just kept DELLs install but tried to get rid of some of the extra crap. The computer became almost unusable, real strange things started hapening with USB. Example being I couldn't plug both my Nano and my Shuffle in at the same time without it crashing. Finally I formated, and installed XP from scratch, now it all works wonderful.

If you do install from scratch, make sure to get all the drivers off DELLs site and put them on a disk first. You can't get any of the drivers off the backup disk, and internet doesn't work unless you install the correct chipset drivers.
 
Here is what I did once I got my Dell laptop.

(1) Download all drivers for my laptop and burn them to a CD.
(2) Boot the laptop off the WinXP Pro CD.
(3) Deleted all partitions and formatted using NTFS.
(4) Installed WinXP Pro.
(5) Installed all the drivers in order.
(6) Used a third-party partitioning product to create partitions. I used the Acronis Partition Expert program to create 5 partitions out of my 60GB HDD.

My laptop is definitely slim, free of bloatware, and fast.

I use the Diskeeper program to keep my main C partition defragmented and installed my own programs instead of relying on Dell's.
 
soulsaver_8229 said:
im a n00b to laptops and i have a 6000D, how can i tell if i have bloatware? :p


soulsaver
Click to expand...

You do.

In all seriousness if you haven't wiped your harddrive and reinstalled windows (not from a recovery disk) there are going to be unnecessary things running.
 
When i got my 6000d it was very very annoying with all those registration things especially the AV. after trying it out for 3 days, i did a fresh install, much cleaner than factory
 
i might have to just bite the bullet and buy a legit copy of an OS. for so long i have been using corporate from a friends work, but it doesnt allow the upgrade to sp2...

id like to finally have a machine that is completely legit w/o having to worry. maybe i will just annoy the hell out of dell and see what happens.
 
Dell does provide the OS disks still but you have to pay $10. I have seen plenty of stories of people pestering the hell out of them and getting it for free. Good luck.
 
yes i found something on notebook forums and i already emailed dell asking for the stuff. it seems all you have to do is make up some bs and then they will go ahead and send it, so that is what i am going to do!@
 
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