For every person that says Dell sucks I can find you one that says they are amazing. I've worked in IT for 8 years and have the purchasing power for all of my IT equipment, and if I could I'd choose Dell any day of the week. Unfortunately the CEO of my company's parent corporation sits on the board of directors for IBM and we are forced (silently) to use IBM for everything. IBM is great, but highly overpriced... I could decrease my IT budget by 1/3 switching to all Dell if I could. I also worked for MCI and Exxon here in Houston which were Dell and LOVED it... I've worked for Halliburton and Shell which use Compaq/HP and hated it.
heh....the Halliburton location up near the big airport? You *might* know my brother in law.TE and I agree as far as the Dells go...I worked IT for a school district, and we used Dells exclusively...didnt have many problems who's source wasnt between the keyboard and the chair...and when we did, we got prompt and courteous service. btw, Im tired of contract...anyon know of any IT depts looking for good techs? Im so desperate to get a established position, Im willing to do tech support. thats right...I said it...I will do help desk.
Mm. Probably out of its return period then. They could fix it for you, but like you said it wouldn't be covered out of warranty. So you can't get into the bios or nothing?
Man, good thing you posted that... I just found out today one of our new hires failed the background check, if you are willing to do help desk then we have a full time position open. It is a permanent job with a 2-3 month contract probation period (after 3 months if they like you they hire you, and you get full benefits)... It is a small company (about 300 users nationwide, 230 on-site) and we are located at Richmond & Wilcrest. Email your resume to jeff.broadway@broad-source.com and let him know that you were referred by Brad Groux from RBC and would like to hear more about our desktop opening. You should know that we are a financial instition and do two extensive and seperate background checks (see the new hire booted above for details ;-). http://www.rbcbuilderfinance.com We are a "single family dwelling" lender that was started about 8 years ago and have roughly doubled in size every year since... and about 3 years ago were bought out by the Royal Bank of Canada as a daughter company of their US RBC Centura branch.
No, I can get into the bios. What happens is, I boot up with the XP CD. It does some of its loading procedure. Asks me if I want to repair an installation, install a fresh version or quit. I choose install a fresh installation. It brings up my partitions, I delete whatever is there, create a new one, format it fully with NTFS file system, and then Windows starts copying over its installation files. When it finishes that task, it goes away from the old school blue screen with the ugly yellow progress bar and tries to get into the guts of the Windows XP installation. But it never does. The screen goes black and I can't do anything. If I reboot, it goes right back to black again. If I attempt to use the Repair Installation option, it takes me into the DOS format style directory I am trying to install to, but I have no idea what to do from that point in order to fix things. I can see the files it has copied over at that point, but the setup is far from complete.
Does it have a floppy drive? If so I'd head to bootdisk.com and download a Windows 98 or ME bootdisk and FDISK and format the hard drive the old fashioned way and give it all a shot over again. Have you tried also formatting using FAT32 instead of NTFS, there may be some kind of issue with the file system on the drive since you destroyed the recovery partition. When strange crap like this happens you kind of have to throw all logic out the window and give everything a shot.
I haven't tried FAT32, but if I remember correctly, it didn't give me an option of formatting with a FAT32 partition when I tried to reinstall. I'll try again tonight and see if that is a choice. Edit: Oh, and no floppy drive. Old computer had one, but it doesn't even work anymore...probably from lack of use.
You should get an option like this... You can always convert the drives to NTFS after the initial install.
Yeah, and that's the type of screen I have, except the FAT32 options are not there. All I have is NTFS (Quick) and NTFS.
Hmm, didn't think to tell you but you have to create a partition below 32GB for that option to show up... worth a shot. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q314463&ID=kb;en-us;Q314463
Well, that might have solved the problem but I decided, since it was about 28 days since I bought it (limit 30), to go ahead and return the thing. I think I can get a better deal anyway. Despite the dual core processors, the damn thing didn't seem to run all that fast. Despite DrexlerFan22's problems, I've heard too many good things about Dell machines and they have really good prices. I think I'll get one of those.
Glad to hear you weren't stuck with a machine that you can't use. If you order from Dell be sure to check in internet and search eBay for "Dell Coupons"... you can stack multiple coupons with Dell and can get some amazing deals.
No, but I think I will still do it anyway so I can have a XP SP2 installation disk. That would be very handy for the future as I still have only a dial up connection.
