fresh install of vista upon receiving laptop

Is this what everyone is doing?

Questions:
What programs are you installing after the new install? McAfee, etc?

How many less processes are there comparing to the 60+ on my new laptop right now?

and, did you just format the OS drive and then reinstall vista on that drive, keeping the backup partition the same?

and, how many of you are installing xp versus reinstalling vista?

just a few questions!

 

i tried installing xp, but i couldnt slipstream the SATA driver correctally. i was going to clean install, but i couldnt find some drivers

 

the instant i got my 1520 i popped in that vista disk and reinstalled it.
dell bloatware is ridiculous.
its actually a simple process. put in the disk and reformat. oh yea and remember after you reformat vista puts the old windows stuff into a windows.old folder which is about 7gb-10gb of space. just delete that under your c: drive manually or through diskcleanup.
i didnt really install mcafee cuz it was a 3 year preinstalled thing and when i reformatted and reinstalled it, it became a 30day thing so i was confused. avast isnt so bad anyways.
processes also include services. processes alone i probably have ~26. vista has plently of services thats why the numbers so i (or thats my theory. i never really counted that whole list).
nah... vistas pretty cool actually. if only it didnt eat up so much resources and if i had a 7200 rpm hdd i would like it more. my 1520 doesnt stop defraggin for some reason. it never says its done :\

 

I'm gonna do that right now then. I don't have to worry about doing anything with the SATA drivers with vista do I? Did the reinstall overboot your recovery partition?

 

nah... i kept the partion. its not too bad. i kept the dell stuff that was in there. i think theres a recovery file that formats your comp like how it came out of the factory with all that bloatware stuff.

btw... drivers are gunna be a b*tch. it was hella annoying for me but i got it done. i wish the dell resource cd just automatically detect and install the drivers for you automatically. what you really have to do is pick the driver you want extract then install. it was annoying. how do you know if you installed all the necessary drivers? right click my computer and go to device manager. if you have any question marks then you are probably missing a driver. screenshot and post it. i or other people maybe able to help you.

 

is there a tutorial on this forum for reinstalling vista for dells? or a tutorial for removal of bloatware

 

After reading this thread and a few others, I think I'll keep the original install of Vista on my 1420 and just streamline it internally as opposed to doing a fresh install.

 

nodachi, the dell resource cd you are referring to.. it's an included cd with all the drivers on it? so it's simply a matter of finding the right ones on the disk and installing them?

 

I didn't really have to update my drivers, I found most of them uninstalled already in the drivers folder for some reason ?

Wierd.

I want XP though, thats the big problem.

 

I was planning on just installing my own copy of Vista Ultimate immediately and then downloading all the drivers from support.dell.com for my laptop. Then I'll put one the other stuff I need, like AVG Free and MS Office.