New E1505 on the way... OS and format questions...

1. I noticed that my E1505 will not be coming with media. How they still ship laptops without the Windows CD is beyond me. Can I get a CD from Dell? How do I do this? Can I use that chat feature in their service section? Even my 4000 and 5150 came with the **** Windows CD.

2. The computer is coming with Windows MCE. Can I use my retail Windows XP Pro Uprgrade CD on it? It's Service Pack 1. Any reason why I'd want to keep Media Center Edition? I doubt I'd use the Media Center part.

3. I will prolly just want to get rid of the Media Direct partition. I can always go back and reformat everything and set it back up later right?

thanks...

 

1.) You should have ordered the OS cd from Dell for 10 bucks when you bought the computer. You can use Dell Chat to get the CDs or you can call, but users have reported greater success with the chat. Some have said that you have to have the computer before they will ship the CD-roms. They usually will send them NBD. I can understand your concern--it is not good practice to not send out CD-ROMs.
2.) No reason why not, but MCE is *in a nutshell* Pro with media features and the ability to join a domain disabled. There is a registry hack to allow you to join a domain with MCE, so I really don't see a reason *not* to use it, especially because it will be much more up-to-date and have a lot more of the bugs fixed.
3.) Yes you can delete it, but it will be very difficult to set up later. It's only about 47 MB, so why not keep it? After you reformat you'll have to use the MediaDirect Repair utility to fix the MBR (master boot record) to get your MediaDirect working properly again. I'd just keep it installed.
4.) Remember that you'll have to delete the Dell Restore partition to reclaim some space when formatting.
5.) Look Here
for more details

Cheers.

 

as noted, there's already a thread on this that is many many pages long.

/closed