XPS 730 Experience

So. my XPS air Coooled 730 arrived today.

I must say the stock image dell uses is horrible..  Honestly, they should simply provide it with nothing installed, and leave it to the end user to set up.. I suspect most people that purchase such a system are going to perform a reinstall anyway.

Mine arrived with a stock XP Pro image, and refused to boot up properly... no worries, I got it working eventually although a hard reset was required.. I wasnt too fussed either though as I had no intention of running xp pro and had a copy of vista ultimate 64 bit SP1 waiting on the sidelines to set up.

So two boots into XP to test basic functionality I throw in the Vista disk and set about the install.. All goes great! Drivers easy enough to find, although I have a couple of freezes after I install it and before I install the correct nvidia drivers, but since then... solid as a rock. I did have a sligh hiccup with my network, and for some reason I needed to do a hard reset of the router and cable modem to get proper bandwidth throughput, but this was probably down to my horrible Linksys..

So while not perfect out of the box, but with a few hours work... which I was going to do anyway, the system is looking great and I'm almost comfortable enough to throw away the box it came in... which by the way is huge!

Anyway just wanted to share my experience with this system so far.