Dell Inspiron 9100 freezing up with games

After waiting for about a week for my new Inspiron 9100 which I really like, Im suffering with flight simulators. I purchased "Lock on" which is a combat sim, and the system out of nowhere just freezes where I have to press the power button to turn off. Also, I bought another program called "Trainz", which is a train sim. Also, this program causes my system to freeze.

Something else of interest is that I downloaded "Imesh", a music file sharing program which I paid extra to get no pop ups. Program works great on my 5 year old Gateway desktop running Win98, but when loading on the desktop the registration window wouldnt open completely, therefore the send botton couldnt be obtained because of the window not opening all the way.

An MP3 player my wife bought, same thing. Installation window wont open all the way, leaving words and selections running into the walls of the window. Cant do anything to correct this.

Any chance I got a lemon? Dell is sending me a replacement but so far Im no fan of this laptop. P4 2.8 512 RAM Radeon 128 40gig HD WUXGA res..

Any comments? This is my first notebook, and Im a little frustrated. Please help.

Regards

 

rather than the laptop itself being bad, it's more possible that the windows installation got corrupted somehow. when you get the replacement laptop, be sure to update all of the drivers. DirectX, video card, and motherboard drivers from Dell.