>>In another thread people are talking about their favorite brands of computers. Thought it would be good to put this in it's own thread.
>>
>>Here are my votes:
>>
>>Laptops : Lenovo
>>Desktops : Systemax
>>Rackmount Servers : Dell
>>Desktop Servers: Dell
>>
>>
>>I will never buy another Dell. Too many desktop and laptop failures. HP machines always sucked for reliability and came so loaded with crapware that you had to basically reinstall the O.S. fresh. Good riddance.
>
>Never bought servers so I do not know, but for desktops I've always built my own computers except twice, one when we arrived to Canada as I wanted to start writing resumes and researching for jobs right away so I bought an IBM PC as soon as we found a house for rent. I liked this PC very much and it never failed me, I just retired it for it was old (and not one month ago I finally got rid of the 15" IBM monitor that I was still using for helping me when building computers), I still have the hard drive somewhere, and I am sure it still works.
>
>The second computer I bought was a little more than a year ago, maybe a year and a half and it was a very fancy and powerful Dell... which died last week, I still need to find out why, but I turn it one, it starts booting and dies even before starting windows... so I am not very fond of Dell...
>
>For laptops, I have two and they are the only ones I ever bought, a Toshiba and a HP, the Toshiba is quite old and the screen will not stay up any longer and the HP I like it very much, is one that you can transform in a tablet hiding the keyboard, so I do not have a favourite as I like 'em both.

Have you tried running System Restore on the balky Dell? IIRC you have to press F8 before the Windows logo appears, then follow the prompts. That's for Win7 and I'm sure is slightly different on earlier versions. I had to do that recently on one of my daughters' PCs.