New Dv9000t (vista) - Observations and questions

Quick specs on krimebot and krimebots laptop
DV9000T - 2 Gig Proc, 2 Gig Ram, 2x100GB 7200Rpm HD, Nvidia 7600 go 512 mb, widescreen (bought os and recovery disks)
Krimebot - HPUX/Sun Solaris/Red Hat SA starting 1999, on the side (perl programmer (unix based) and VBA Apps (front office apps)). Windows Based Computers since Dos 3.2 (all iterations but Millenium).

I just wanted to say that before I start... I know what I want in a laptop, and I'm hard on computers.

When I my laptop finally arrived, I was pretty disappointed with the out of box perfomance... it seemed sluggish and bloated to me. I knew this was going to be the case... but still it was not what I expected from a brand new $2700 laptop. It took about 10 minutes before I reinstalled the OS. I then learned that I needed (wanted) some information under the swsetup directory... so I put recovered my laptop (a slow painful experience). Copied of the dir, and re-reinstalled the os (which is really not to bad a process).

After reinstalling my os, updating windows, updating my bios, and my updating drivers. The performance was very good (I would not describe it as rocket fast) but it has a nice high end perfomance feel. I also went out and spent some money on a Transcend 150x 4GB SD card, and dedicated it to ReadyBoost... on the off chance that it might help take some of the burden off my hard disks when booting windows (so far I've noticed no difference).
My current Windows Vista Performance rating is 4.5 (I'm sorry I did not check the clean install performance rating).

Now that my laptop is performing to my expectations, I really do enjoy it. I has an awesome grand piano finish, and a beatiful screen (actually a little to beautiful... especially when watching TV from the internet... but DVDs look great).

Now for my one question... at some point my little mini-expresscard remote lost the mapping to media center (press the Windows logo-looking button). Outside of that it works fine, I can navigate in MCE and adjsut the volume... pressing the power button puts the laptop in hybernation)... but I would really like to get that media center function back. Is this controlled through the Quick Play Buttons driver/software pack (because I have removed and reinstalled it several times)? Anyone out there have any recommendations?

 

Bump.. bump...bump

 

This might prove helpful for id'ing devices

Unknown Device Identifier 5.02

Freeware
Unknown Device Identifier enables you to identify the yellow question mark labeled Unknown Devices in Device Manager. And reports you a detailed summary for the manufacturer name, OEM name, device type, device model and even the exact name of the unknown devices. With the collected information, you might contact your hardware manufacturer for support or search the Internet for the corresponding driver with a simple click. With this utility, you might immediately convert your unidentified unknown devices into identified known devices and find proper driver on the Internet and contact the hardware device manufacturer or vender. Known devices recognized by Microsoft Windows will also be analyzed independent of the operating system.

You are suggested to do a thorough driver backup with My Drivers after you have identified all the unknown devices with their proper device drivers software installed.


Supported OS: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003. Future OS are supported via the online update. You might even run the small freeware utility from CD or floppy.


Features

- Identify USB 1.1/2.0 Device
- Identify IEEE 1394 Device
- Identify ISA Plug&Play Device
- Identify AGP Bus Device
- Identify PCI Device
- Multilingual interface: English, French
- Find Drivers for Hardware Devices
- Contact Hardware Vender directly
- Save or Print Hardware information


Screen shots


http://www.zhangduo.com/udi.html

 

I have the same laptop and the same configuration, and my Windows Experience "out of the box" is 4.5, the lowest score being the memory.

I did not have to do any of the things you did. It just worked fine for me out of the box.