Just receive 700m--What should i do now?

I just received my 700m.
My 700m does come with many progrms like aol, jukemusic and others program i dont need. I saw somewhere many mention about reinstall/reformat but i dont know how to do and can't find the post. As i recall i need to download some driver--so many thing..Can someone tell me what to do?
Beside the 700m, and 2 cd of softwares, dell didn't give me anything else not even the XP pro software.
many thanks

 

I would not recommend this if your not familiar with this process already.(reformatting) Just go ahead and run XP home adition...its not that bad after all. Remove the unnecessary programs in add/remove and clean up the os up a tad.
Home runs fast if you know how to tweak it...but i still prefer XP pro
good luck bro.

"What we do in life echoes in eternity"

 

thanks for the guide
dell didn't provide me the xp pro cd. where do i get it to boot up? i tried to go to support from dell site but i dont know where to ask for the disk. i do have xp pro. on my 700m

 

Its not hard to do a clean install. Download all your drivers off the Dell site and burn them. (install the chipset first) Then change your boot order in the bios. Hit F2 at the begining of the boot process. Have your CD drive boot before your hard drive. Then install the XP CD and reboot. Windows guides you threw the rest of the install. You probably want to delete all partitions and reformat. Google for a detail guide.

 

mods, sticky?

 

1. contact dell and they will send you xp pro cd and/or driver cd; if you don't get a driver cd, the only one you really need is the nic driver or wifi driver, once you reformat/reinstall and install the nic/wifi driver, you can then connect to dell's website and get the rest... if you get the driver cd, you obviously don't need to do this step.

2. enter "setup" by pressing f2 during boot up when it asks you to, then make sure that the boot device sequence has the cd/dvd drive come before the hard drive

3. boot from xp cd

4. follow prompts/instructions

5. it's extremely simple to reformat and reinstall, there's only 2 or 3 places where you are asked to make any type of decision, the rest is just a waiting game while xp installs. uninstalling programs is nowhere near as helpful since there are many leftover registry entries, empty folders, and compressed executables... i daresay that the amount of time unstalling and rebooting to get all the crap off will probably take you almost the same amount of time as a doing a fresh install.

 

great advice drumfu. I'm considering doing the same thing to my 700m which came installed with XP Home. OS/driver CDs were not included in the box. You think Dell will ship them to me if I asked? Are the NIC and Wi-Fi drivers the only issues I should be aware of? And they both reside on the drivers CD from Dell?


<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by drumfu

 

1. dell will send you cds if you ask

2. the nic/wifi driver isn't an "issue" as in a bad thing... it's just that if you have the nic/wifi driver, then you can connect to the web and download the other drivers you will need from dell's website... all the drivers you need for your system are available from dell's website, there's just no need to waste time dl'ing all of them, when you can just dl the nic/wifi drivers and then connect and download them after your reformat/reinstall

 

drumfu, thanks so much for the detailed info. I will call dell and request the cd.