New XPS M1210 / Question about CD-DVD drive, Vista, and idle

Hey, everyone! I've been lurking around this board for a few months now, and after getting my 1210, I finally decided to join! I just want to thank everyone here first for all the helpful posts, as it has really helped me out in making my decision when buying my new laptop!

Okay, I have 4 questions I hope you can help me on.

- When I play DVDs with my optical drive (I tried to watch some movies), I notice the drive goes quiet at some points as if the spinning has gone down quite a bit. Then, after a while, the fast spinning sound comes back, accompanied by some beeps and boops (electronic-sounding, not mechanical). Now, the DVD plays just fine. The video doesn't stop or skip and the audio is fine. But, I was just wondering if anyone else has this, especially the beeps and boops? (Oh, and this only happens when I play DVDs. Playing CDs and burning CDs and DVDs don't have this. Also, I've tried Media Player, Media Direct, and Windows Media Centre.)

- I have Vista Ultimate pre-installed on my 1210. I recently noticed that when I use Outlook Web Access to get e-mail on Internet Explorer, I have a problem: When I try to send a new e-mail, it crashes Internet Explorer! I don't have this problem with Firefox. Plus, if I switch Outlook Web Access to "Basic" mode (instead of using Premium, which is the default), everything works fine. Does anyone else have this, and does anyone have a solution?

- Also about Vista, for those who have the 1210, how long does it take for your laptop to fully start up and be ready to use? (I find mine takes about a minute. Sometimes, it's longer as it seems Dell Quickset takes a while to load.)

- Finally, after starting up my laptop, I notice that if I leave it idle, the harddrive indication light continues to flash for anywhere from 1 minute to 3 minutes as if it's processes something or running something, and then finally slows down. Does anybody else have this? Also, if you don't, what could be causing this?

(I haven't installed anything in my laptop since I received it. I have just removed the bloatware, which wasn't as much or as bad as I thought it would be. All Dell put on was Skype, Google Desktop and Toolbar for IE, and Roxio Creator 9, one of the drivers of which is incompatible with Vista!)

Well, that's about it. Thank you very much in advance for any help! You guys all rock!

 

you can start off my reinstalling Windows Vista Ultimate. thanks

 

and to answer your question, yes, my optical drive makes a lot of noises. Beep beeeeeep booooop. lol

 

Hey, Sirius! Thanks for replying!

Well, I just did it and I honestly think I messed up. Not only can I not seem to get the drivers back onto my laptop properly despite following instructions from this site, but before the clean install, I had 65 GB of free space on my HDD, and after the clean install, I only had 40 GB! I checked the files and whatnot, and I couldn't find any reason for the 15 GB increase in space used. To make things worse, the loading time for the system actually increased... In the end, I had to use F8 to reinstall from Dell's recovery partition. Argh.

But, at least this time around after uninstalling the bloatware, my system is slightly faster. LOL

P.S. - Hm, maybe the CD/DVD drive is trying to speak to me! Beeeep boooooooooop beeeeeeep! R2D2!

 

yes it's telling you "Please correctly reformat my friend the Hard Drive! He can't tell you personally with noises because Bloatware has his hands over his mouth!"

just kidding

When you put in the vista reinstall cd, make sure you boot from the CD DRIVE by restarting and pressing F12 when the BIOS screen is loading.

And once you're at the menu, you should have around 3 partitions.

click on advanced tab on the right and click delete on all three of them.

Once you've deleted the last partition, it should say that you have one partition that has rougly 74.5GB of harddrive space.

select that of course and click next to begin the installation.

If you have problems, hopefully someone could help you because I NEED SLEEEEEEP.

Goodnight and good luck

 

Keep in mind that deleting all of your partitions will remove the Media Direct feature on your notebook.

 

Oh, wow! Thanks for the tips! I think I'll have my more-computer-literate buddy sit down with me when I reinstall Vista Ultimate once again. LOL

You guys rock!

P.S. - Beeeep Beeeeeeeeeeep Boooooooooop!

 

Remember if you want to keep the Dell MediaDirect feature you have to install it first before Windows (that is if you decide to format the entire drive), there are instructions that come with the CD.

About the idle thing I know occasionally it happens because Vista is made so that by default, weekly it automatically defrags your hard drive when you are idling, maybe that could be it (I gotta say I do like that feature)

 

After uninstalling everything I was left with 40 processes running at idle on mine with vista home premium... Seems a bit high. Is there hidden crap or something? Or does vista just run a ton of services?

BTW clear out your prefetch folder, it knocked my boot times down to about 30 seconds from over a minute.

 

Well, I'm new to the forum too. Just bought my M1210 a couple of weeks ago and this thing is SO nice. I'd say this is pretty close to the perfect laptop.

Mine has Vista Home Premium installed and here are a couple of observations that partially answer some questions:

- My DVD drive makes the weird noises too. It's made by TSSSomethingorother. Sounds like a cheap OEM to me. Mine has actually frozen a couple of times in the middle of a movie. The system is still responsive, so I don't think it's a software lockup in Media Direct. Weird. Maybe I just have a flaky drive.

- I use Outlook Web Access for my work and haven't had any issues using IE Explorer. However, it won't work in Firefox on my laptop. Both work fine on my home desktop running XP Professional.

- It takes around a minute for mine to boot up all the way as well. That Quickset app takes a long time.

- I was curious about the hard drive running with no open applications too. I dug a little deeper and discovered it's part of the indexing service that Vista uses. It scans your hard drive during idle time to collect information about every file name, email, etc. on your hard drive, so when you enter it into the search from the Start button you get instant results. It took me about a week of using my laptop before it had indexed everything. Now it just does it for a few minutes sometimes after I've installed a new program or gotten new email. *Edit* The hard drive is also working to prefetch programs and defrag sometimes, but those had already been pointed out.