FedEx delivered my shiny new XPS 420 yesterday and I was very happy to receive it right before Christmas.\u00a0\u00a0My XPS 420\u00a0came\u00a0with\u00a0a Intel Q6600 quad-core CPU hosted on\u00a0a Intel X38 based motherboard, plenty of USB ports, two 1394a ports,\u00a0five sound jacks, SPDIF, and a surprise eSATA port.\u00a0 Dell also included a card reader with bluetooth receiver and a little LCD screen called Windows SideShow.<\/p>\n
The installation was piece of cake and I lighted it up almost instantly.\u00a0 My first impression regarding this machine was: OMG this machine is HORRIBLY SLOW! How much crap ware did they install on it?\u00a0 Well, not much.\u00a0 Google Desktop, Norton Internet Security 2007, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Roxio CD burning software, and that’s it.\u00a0\u00a0I wondered that Google Desktop was dragging too much CPU and I\/O resource\u00a0because the system\u00a0booted faster\u00a0after\u00a0\u00a0its removal.<\/p>\n
If you did not order two hard drives as RAID, then the default BIOS settings prohibited the use of eSATA because it did not turn on RAID on ICH9R.\u00a0 However, if you had turned it on, then the preloaded Vista refused to boot.\u00a0 As a result it left me little choice but to reinstall the OS because I had an external SATA\u00a0drive to hook on.<\/p>\n
Reinstalling Vista\u00a064 bits\u00a0was not that bad compared to the installation of XP 64 bits.\u00a0 Fewer questions were asked and the installation speed was decent.\u00a0 Yeah, we all knew that things never ran too smoothly especially reinstall a Windows machine from scratch.\u00a0 This time it was the nVidia x64\u00a0VGA\u00a0driver that\u00a0screwed my installation and I was forced to reinstall Vista again.\u00a0 If the nVidia driver’s installation\u00a0had failed,\u00a0Vista asked you whether you wanted to re-install using default settings or not.\u00a0 NEVER SAY YES.\u00a0 It called the uninstaller, and nVidia had a bug in their nvuninst.exe which crashed due to calling string comparison function without checking the input pointer.\u00a0 Best of all, the error message was extremely misleading because it said that you were using a 32 bit uninstaller in 64 bit environment.\u00a0 The steps suggested in their forum <\/a>was not helpful.<\/p>\n The machine was much more responsive and booted faster after the installation was done.\u00a0 Of course I did not hook on Google Desktop this time.\u00a0 I hoped that Dell shipped my gift cards faster so that I could keep on shopping other computer stuff on their web site before I ran out of my money in purchasing toys for my kids\u00a0\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" FedEx delivered my shiny new XPS 420 yesterday and I was very happy to receive it right before Christmas.\u00a0\u00a0My XPS 420\u00a0came\u00a0with\u00a0a Intel Q6600 quad-core CPU hosted on\u00a0a Intel X38 based motherboard, plenty of USB ports, two 1394a ports,\u00a0five sound jacks, SPDIF, and a surprise eSATA port.\u00a0 Dell also included a card reader with bluetooth receiver […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}