New Laptop

**Champ** · 12-21-2005, 07:27 PM

Intel Centrino, Athlon Turion or Mobile Athlon 64?

**adamp2p** · 12-21-2005, 08:50 PM

Originally Posted by lynx

Dell's standard notebook hard drive specs are exactly the same as HP's standard drives - 5400rpm in 60,80 and 100GB sizes. Both have the option of 7200rpm drives at (vastly inflated) extra cost. Since neither specify the origin of their drives it is impossible to say which are better, supposedly identical models could have different drives.

My personal advice would be to stay away from any of the major suppliers (Sony, HP, Dell, Toshiba, maybe others). All of them seem intent on interfering with how you run your system by installing their own "system monitoring software", and since all software is expensive to develop they don't put it on there for free, it is reflected in the price.

It appears that Dell are now installing Myway spyware too. There appears to something of a stink developing about this, since the uninstaller doesn't uninstall all of it, but it disables the uninstaller.

But lynx, I am pretty computer literate myself; so the first thing I would do is re-install Windows as the Dell install has so much crap it stinks.

Are you inferring that if I re-install Windows on a Dell laptop I would necessarily need to re-install the Dell "monitoring" software? I did not have to re-install this software on either of my Dell desktops...

Thank you again for your help.

**lynx** · 12-22-2005, 12:38 AM

Obviously, you don't need to re-install the Dell software, but AFAIK that means you can't use the standard recovery disk, which in turn means you can't use the supplied product key. So you paid for a version of XP which you aren't using.

**sArA** · 12-22-2005, 12:46 AM

Aren't we all

**clocker** · 12-22-2005, 01:57 AM

Originally Posted by lynx

Obviously, you don't need to re-install the Dell software, but AFAIK that means you can't use the standard recovery disk, which in turn means you can't use the supplied product key. So you paid for a version of XP which you aren't using.

AND you'll have to dig up all your own drivers.