I just got a new Dell E6400 from work and after only two weeks with it, i'm terribly disappointed with it.  I traded in a 6 year old IBM T41 Thinkpad which ran perfectly, for this hunk of junk.  The E6400 came with Win 7 Pro installed and a ton of Dell ware.  The machine take a long time to boot up, takes minutes to shutdown.  Minutes to wakeup from sleep and if I close the lid while its running, eventually it shuts itself off and never comes alive again.  I have disabled all the options for the machine to go to sleep if the lid is closed.  Another thing I don't like about it is the track pad.  I've tried everything to get the Alps trackpad to work better, but it stinks.  The Thinkpad had a Synaptics pad which was a pleasure to use.

Ok, now my latest problem.  I had waken the machine up from sleeping overnight and it was consuming over 3.5 gigs of RAM and there was NOTHING running on my taskbar.  I opened up the task manager and selected to view all process and there were a ton of processing running, but nothing I could identify as chewing all my memory up.  There were quite a few svchosts and a ton of dell crap ware running.  

My question is, will this laptop run ok if I wipe it clean and put a new install of Win 7 on it and not install the dell control panel software?  I have two other laptops at home, both far cheaper than this dell and they run Win7 1000 times better than the dell.  I can only attribute my problems to either crappy hardware or Dell software.  

Anyone have luck installing their own Win 7 and leaving off the dell ware?

TIA