Just received my new laptop... problems...

I received my Vostro 1500 yesterday, however the OS loads very slowly.. and when in the actual OS, it locks up sometimes. (I cans till move my mouse and everything, etc.) I called dell and they said that I needed to reinstall the OS... but they did not give me any OS discs... so they are sending them to me. I have a copy of XP Home that I might want to install over Vista, but do any of you have any tips for the meantime?

 

First, run a hard drive and memory diagnostic. The easy way to do this is to keep pressing F12 as the computer boots and then run them from the Dell diagnostic utility partition (don't worry, it's easy).

Beyond that, I'm not sure if it will help you, but you might want to try downloading Autoruns (google it) and disabling some of the extraneous startup entries. If anything causes a big problem, you can simply enter Safe Mode, run autoruns, and reenable it.

A couple of things to consider:

1) Run Autoruns as administrator by right-clicking on it and selecting "Run As Administrator" instead of the usual double-click so that it has access to your registry
2) If you find it unbearable to use it in normal Windows thanks to the problems you're experiencing, you might find it more useful running in Safe Mode.

If you don't know how to get to Safe Mode (though I'm sure you do), you simply hit F8 repeatedly as the computer starts up to display the boot menu. Then, select Safe Mode. I suggest trying it With Networking first, and if that works, stick with it (then, you can use the internet from within Safe Mode). If it still gives you issues, do just Safe Mode.

Once you get done disabling things that are slowing you down, try uninstalling some things.

Good luck, and sorry to hear about the problems.

 

If vista is not running well on your system which has 2gb of memory, then there is seriously a problem. I think you shouldn't even think about installing windows xp at this moment and should call dell to report the problem. This sounds more like hardware problem.

My system runs vista great, I played F.E.A.R yesterday on it and it plays very well! I'm loving it.

 

Yeah, sounds to me like a hard drive issue personally. Also could be a RAM problem, but that is less likely (as generally that causes blue screens when the system tries to read from bad memory locations).

 

could be corrupted bloatware, wait till you get the discs and just format it with a fresh copy of vista

 

Really could be... but the first thing I'd do is run that diagnostic, as it can never hurt to check, and it seems at least fairly likely that could be the issue. If it isn't, try the autoruns technique I described above and see if you can't at least get things running satisfactorily.

Just my two cents.

 

Hello - I am having the EXACT same problem with mine (Inspiraon 1721)...just got it last night and a ton of problems. I posted another thread about mine....but anyway, I spent hours on the phone with tech support today and I am reinstalling Vista on it now. If that doesn't work, they are sending me a replacement.