So, some of you might remember that I got a new Dell Studio 17 laptop.
I immediately had to nuke the hard drive and reinstall Vista, since the (FUCKING) Dell bloatware preinstalled bogged the whole thing down to a crawl.
OK, so that went well (thanks, Dopers!), and I was cruising along happily.
One night, I was moving the couch to vacuum, and when I put it back, unbeknownst to me, the plug end of the AC adapter got stuck under the leg. When I sat down, squish.
Uh oh. I kludged it back together with electrical tape, and it seemed to work. It charged the battery, etc. Well, eventually, it stopped working. No problem. My fault. So I order a new AC adapter from Dell. During this time, the battery discharged completely.
When the new adapter got here, I charged the battery and booted up…to find that my desktop is missing virtually all of the icons, my bookmarks are all gone, and photos that I’d transferred onto this laptop are now gone.
WTF? How is that possible? Is all this stuff stored someplace else besides the non-volatile, entirely transferable hard drive?
Did you right click the desktop and hit the refresh button? Or try: right click, view - show desktop icons. The icons also may have moved off the screen so turn on auto arrange.
You have my sympathies. I bought a Dell XPS and it is a POS. Little thinks like the rubber pads fall off, and it gets so hot I can’t play any games on it without a floor fan blowing on it while I game.
Your user profile may have become corrupted, so stuff is still there but “invisible”. I am unfamiliar with Vista, but maybe you should post this in GQ (or have a MOD move it).
Not sure how you’ve got your desktop and menus configured so I’ll give you some generic instructions that should work for most setups.
Right-click on the start menu and select explore. You should get an explorer window starting at something like C:\Documents and Settings\Ogre\Start Menu.
Look around that area and there should be another directory with some varient of Ogre. Ogre.000 or Ogre~ or Ogre.network
Open that directory and go to the Desktop folder. All your old desktop stuff should be there. Just drag it to your current desktop.
Same thing for the My Documents folder. And Favorites.
Oh. Just reread and noticed that you’re on Vista. Shouldn’t matter, but someone can correct me if there are differences.
Yuh oh. My mom’s new laptop, winging its way to her condo as I speak, is that exact model (and yes it was my decision as to which one to give her-she an almost complete computer neophyte). Depending on how laggy it is, I may be dropping back in here for advice. My own effing fault for not noticing the original thread in question.
I’ve got a Dell Inspiron laptop that I’m annoyed with, and might decide to pull the trigger on. Any tips on how to deal with “cleaning” a Dell laptop that doesn’t have the Vista install disks? (It’s on a partition on the HD.) I’m most worried about how to get a non-Dell-provided driver for the wireless connection in the process, since I’ve never messed with that before.
I could say the same things about my Dell Dimension that went kaflloooey last summer, and i know it’s not shiny and new, but that doesn’t mean that it should crash several times a day.
Last week I reformatted for the third time in five months, and hopefully it will be alright…
My 4-year old Inspiron 8600 is working like a charm, still has more than 3 hours of battery life and never had any issues whatsoever. I replaced the hard disk with a larger one and upgraded from CD-burner to DVD burner, so I probably avoided some wear and tear there, but still - the best couple of hundred EUROs I ever spent, and you can pry it from my cold, dead hands …
Now that I posted about it, it will probably submit to Murphy’s Law and crash horribly.
Small difference. Documents and Settings was renamed simply Users (one of the few vista changes i can completely get behind, much easier to manage at the command line)
So it should simply be C:\Users"Username"\
In that directory should be desktop, documents, downloads, etc, etc. You need to show hidden files to browse everything in there, though probably not for the things you’d be looking for. If so it’s: Tools->Folder options. Hit the view tab and about 1/3 of the way down the advanced settings area should be a radio box for “Show hidden files and folders”
Which might be especially useful if you didn’t set up a user account as there seems to be a “Default” user account folder that’s hidden. There’s nothing in it in my install(well a bunch of empty folders are in it). But it might be worth checking out.
The start menu shouldn’t even enter into it but if it’s needed it seems to be stored at:
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu
I’m not sure where it puts it if you have multiple user accounts. Weird location for it.
Good luck finding your files. They should be there somewhere. Though the filesystem may have been corrupted if it lost power while running. My understanding is this is extremely unlikely with NTSF, but i’m rather more ignorant on the topic than i’d like to be. Even if that did happen it should be recoverable, i believe, just more difficult.
After swearing to myself that I wouldn’t buy another Dell, due to more than one nasty experience with tyheir desktops, I found myself in love with this traveltop replacement Studio XPS 13 Laptop. Had everything I was looking for and then some…fast processor, maxed-out ram, lit keyboard, sleek looks, etc. Got about three weeks ago, and let’s just say that other then the time I was actually traveling, I have not used it again. Thing crashes more than NASA.
And I am not alone in this thinking as a quick skimming of the dedicated Dell forum shows.
A Precision M6400 recently purchased for my dad’s work has proved nothing but trouble. It’s an absolute lemon, and the only mitigating feature is that their business procedures are so unutterably shit that they seem to have forgotten to bill him for it.
Despite this, it still seems more money than it’s worth.
My own experience with Dell as a company has been positive. Had a monitor go bad (regular old desktop CRT style) and called Dell service. This was a refurbished Dell – a “previously owned” computer they’d sold me cheap. But the warranty was supposedly the same as for a new Dell.
The Dell service line phone-answerer (I don’t know if they are “technicians”) walked me through the usual idiot-screening. “Is it plugged in? Is it connected to the CPU? Is your household power working? Are there any lights at all on the monitor?” and so on.
Then he cheerfully told me they’d ship out a replacement. I was to put the bad monitor into the replacement’s box and send it right back.
Because I called late and the call took a while, it was after 9:00 PM on a weeknight when I hung up.
The next morning I’m at work at 8:00 AM and the phone rings. It’s my wife, sounding a bit disoriented.
“It’s here,” she says. “Uh…what?” “The monitor.”
Dell processed the request after 9:00 PM at night and had a new monitor at my door – California to Virginia – in less than 11 hours.
All covered by warranty, no cost to me.
I’m sure they do let people down, but sometimes they’re pretty sharp.
PS: I find it entirely appropriate that a knowledgeable source about Windows Vista goes by the name DemonSpawn.
My impression is that Dell is to computer companies what capitalism is to economic systems–they’re the worst one out there, except for all the others.
My experience with them has been generally positive, though I’d probably be disappointed with my XPS laptop if I did any serious gaming. (It does tend to get hot.)
Depending on how laggy it is, I may be dropping back in here for advice. My own effing fault for not noticing the original thread in question.
