New Laptop Concerns

I have had my Dell XPS m1210 for a few days now and decided to ask some questions about it since i got mine refurbished. Hope someone can help me with these.

1. The side of the laptop, where the black and silver case parts meet, above the s-video and such, is loose. I can push the silver part down to touch the black to see that it is not connected correctly. This goes around all the way to the left side hinge in which the case is loose at that part. Now, is this a big concern? something i should send it back to dell for? I'm not too troubled by it, just afraid it would lead to something larger later on.

2. I took the battery of the laptop out to see and saw that a part of the wiring for the notebook was masking taped to the laptop. Now, is this a extra connector not in need thats just there or is something wrong?

3. Sometimes, when i boot the laptop up, i get to the logon screen to see everything black except the mouse pointer. I can move the mouse around and such in the blackness and still logon, but only the pointer is still there.

4. Last but not least, the boot time into XP is horrible. It takes around 5 seconds to get to the logon screen. But from there, it takes at least 20 seconds. After i log on, it says loading user settings or something and takes forever to load everything. I have a 2300E cpu and 2 GB ram. I also ran tunexp, microsoft bootvis, and disabled some services.

I know this is a little much, but i would appreciaed it if someone can help me with these problems. Thanks

 

1. Press it down a n see if it clicks down.
2. I have that too. Nothing to worry about. My co-work also has it.
3. Do you have a DAEMON or Alcohol emulator on? It cause it. Make sure you do not have it on your start up items and download Registry Mechanic to fix the rest.
4. That might be to the emulators. Do step 3 and you should be fine.

 

1. It doesnt click down, just comes right back up.
2. thanks for clearing that up.
3. i dont have daemon or alcohol installed.
4. same as above

thanks for the help so far. right now, im mainly concerned about the start-up. it gets to the logon screen really fast, but after i sign in, it stays at the logon screen for a minunte before loadin the desktop, and sometimes, it isnt loaded correctly. is there a program that can tell me what is taking the longest to load? thanks

 

Hmm how many processes do you have (how many stuffs do you have when you start up)? Just press Ctrl+Alt Delete. And look at the buttom left.

JC

 

i have 40. I have the creative sound drivers and the program, i8kfangui, zonealarm pro firewall, nod32, nvidia drivers.

i think i might have found the problem out. i used tweak xp to optimize prefetch. but doing that speeds up the time it takes to boot to logon screen, but slows the boot into desktop and vice versa for not optimizing prefetch. is there a way to fix this so both are optimized?

 

Probably, you might need to do a clean install of XP, to get rid of the bloatwares. When I recieved my notebook, of course it was starting up really slow, 2 mins. I decided to format it and do a clean install of XP, after the installation, the boot time was 1:30. Now, since I got a new hd, only 1 min.

JC

 

i alrdy reformatted it twice since i got it >< i also installed antivirus and antispyware right away. oh well, guess ill stick with hibernation

 

Well the only other things to do about the boot up that you havent said are to do a HDD de-frag. If you already havent go into the run menu and run msconfig, startup tab, and disable some stuff. I think you said you already did this, but do it again. You could also disable Hard drive indexing, that might help some. All it really does is give you faster search results for your hard drive, so its not needed. Also, how many users do you have on the system? That could slow it down a bit.

For the case being loose. Its not a critical thing, mainly just astetic. But if you want to fix it, its not that hard to do. Go to support.dell.com and look up the service manual for the 1210 and remove and re-install the palm rest, making sure all clips are clipped and screws are tight. That will fix that.

 

thanks for the help. as for reinstalling the case, will it void warranty?