Vostro 1500 - Thoughts and problems encountered!

I received my Dell Vostro 1500 yesterday, and I’ve noticed a few problems. The biggest problem at the moment is that the screen buzzes whenever the brightness is not 100%, sounds to me like it could be a faulty resistor limiting the voltage to the backlight? Not heard of anyone else complaining of this problem (it’s loud enough that they would). The HDD also seems surprisingly loud, not when doing sequential read/write or during normal loading/use (it makes usual sounds at usual volume), but during idle time sat on the desktop, the occasional access to the HDD every 5-10 seconds or so causes the drive to “click” quite loudly.

On the plus side, I’d heard bad things about the headphone socket, but it appears to be fine. There is a slight electrical noise in the background, but it is very quite and not audible when playing something, and totally inaudible when I run it into my amp. Most onboard audio devices suffer from this type of what I guess is electrical interference from being on the main bus in my experience.

Apart from that performance for the money is fantastic, the touchpad is nice and highly configurable, vga output is strong with the gf 8600. Vista is full of the obligatory crap and a hassle to use, I will soon be looking into putting xp on (providing I can get drivers).

Any help appreciated !