Need some pointers before reformat/clean install

Tomorrow morning I'm gonna wipe the slate clean on my Studio 15. Now, I've read & printed Les' guide, and I would have a fair idea of what was going on anyway, however there's a few doubts in my mind:

• The fingerprint reader. It's amazing how quickly I got used to it and now I would sacrifice living with all this bloat just to keep it. I want the same, full functionality out of it.
• The guide mentions Media Direct 3.*. I have 4. Will it make a difference?
• Office - will I be able to reinstall it? I paid €70 for it after all!
• The HD driver, can I burn it to a cd instead of a thumb drive? Or is it much easier to just use the thumb drive?
• Apart from that ^, what other drivers do I need to get beforehand?

Is there anything else that's changed with the Studios?

 

So basically I don't know the answers to those questions, but, I would recommend looking at all of the advanced options for the power plans before you do the clean install, and printing them out or whatever you need to do to remember them, because mine hasn't really been the same since before the install. That being said, the install did wonders for the performance of my machine.

 

i can answer these for ya. i just did a clean install on my new studio 2 days ago not knowing much lol.

for the fingerprint reader, there should be a cd that came with your laptop for reinstalling the software. i don't remember if there was a driver that also needed to be installed but if there is install it... anyway my fingerprint reader works like a charm after the clean install!

yes, media 4 is different from 3. instead of intially booting from the media direct cd (it won't work it just does a regular boot), you put in the vista cd first. after you're done with the clean install of vista, then you install media direct 4 like you would for any other program.

yep you can reinstall office too. i'm assuming you have the cd and the key on the back of the cd case.

when you say the HD driver do you mean the one that is AHCI? yes you can put that on a cd and then install that driver during the partitioning stage. after you create your partitions there is a button on the bottom left that says something like install drivers. you click on it and put the cd in and install it.

as for other drivers (after you install vista) do the checked ones that are on the cd, look carefully at the unchecked drivers to see if you need any of them, and go to http://support.dell.com/ to look for other drivers that aren't included on the cd.

hope this helps