TriplexDread said:
Yep, ran memtest for over an hour, no faults shown.
Also ran a couple of HDD test proggies from Ultimate Boot CD showed HDD to be ok.
Current state of play is Win Vista installed again, running ok and on update I have selected 'Install important updates only automatically' and I'm going to leave it at that.
It did do that I noticed as on reboot after installing some software it went through the 'Stage 1 of 3 update' procedure.
In Device manager I have three system base devices shown as unknown, one of which is probably the inbuilt webcam, not sure what the others are, I'll come back to that tomorrow, I've had enough for one evening.
Have installed Antivir and Superantispyware and all is working well (touch wood).
Have also installed Acronis True Image 10, backed up C drive and copied the backup file to an external HDD. If it fails again (which I doubt now, tbh, I think I've nailed this thing down) I will use PartedMagic to create a partition and hope that I can install backup file to that partition using PartedMagic, I'm not sure if I can do that.
Either that or boot from Acronis True Image recovery disk and try and do it that way. Not foolproof but some insurance is better than no insurance.
I do have to say this Dell is easily the best laptop I've ever used, it has a decent sized screen, looks good and is quite fast, even with Vista.
This has been a learning experience for sure but I wouldn't want to do this crap for a living