The 8400 XPhome desktop and the 1525 Vista notebook. The 8400 is about 3-4 years old and the 1525 is 6 months old. The first to go was the 8400. I leave it running all the time and it gets little use since the notebook got here. A couple of days ago I went to look something up on the Internet and when I turned on the monitor there was a blue screen. Rebooting got me the same blue screen. Rebooting to safe mode didn't blue screen, but paused at one of the files that zip past when you're booting to safe mode, then frozen. Tried to boot with the XP disk, blue screen. The first error was ATI...something so I thought maybe it was my video card gone bad. No time to mess with this now, I'll just use the notebook. A couple of hours later we were going to watch some Netflix on the plasma using the 1525. Whatever I clicked on, start button, desktop icon, an error would come up in a small window that I'd never seen before about Windows Explorer needs to restart or something to that effect. The desktop would "reset" itself and click error, click error. This went on for a couple of minutes. Couldn't even shut down so I held the power button. That was the end of the 1525. Never could get it to restart even using the Vista disk. I did manage to get the diagnostics to run and it said disk drive failure. I can't remember the exact wording. Well, I didn't have a SATA external enclosure so I ordered one from Newegg. The one that Journey posted about the other day made by Thermaltake. I thought maybe I could salvage some of the recent stuff that didn't get backed up. So I waited for UPS to show up. Newegg shipped fast as usual and just as fast I found out the drive is toast. I used my ancient HP laptop and my new enclosure and the 1525 drive (a Samsung) was hosed so bad it couldn't be read. The 8400 drive (Maxtor) could be read just fine. The enclosure takes 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives. I'm running out of time so I'll wrap up quick. The 8400's problem turned out to be (by process of elimination) one of the memory sticks. Ordered 2 new 1 gig sticks from crucial.com for . Nice upgrade double the ram. The 1525 drive was ordered last night around 5pm CDT. Nice short call because I already had the error codes wrote down. Actually had a couple of digital pictures of the errors that I took with my camera. The new drive (with factory image) arrived this afternoon 17 hours after my first and only call to Dell support. Pretty darned impressive. alien
