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I certainly would wipe everything clean with a desktop PC... but this is my first laptop ever and it has some nifty partitioning for a MediaDirect feature (quick boot to a non-Vista environment for playing music, DVD's... via it's own HW button) that I don't want to mess with. There is some potentially useful stuff too (like optimizing software for the touchpad, hardware manuals...). I really need to dig in and see what stuff I want to keep.

The only SW I know for sure I want to remove is MS Works (completely useless junk) and the free Norton Security 30 day trial package (which I'll only keep until I decide what AV and firewall I want to use). Then there's all the Media Center crap that comes with Vista Home Premuim I won't be using... (cause this won't be a home entertainment hub). Hopefully some of that can be stripped out. Also, I'm running with the Areo interface now just to check it out, but I'll probably be dumping that (for performance reasons) after not too long as well.

If I find much more that needs to be removed I just might do a re-install of Windows after finding out what I like and exactly how things are configured on the four partitions (only two of which are NTFS, plus a 2GB piece and another tiny 47MB piece). There's a full return-to-factory-state restore (not the Windows buggy restore thing) that I don't want to wipe out too (yet?)... which is probably on the second NTFS partition (with it's 4GB of data).

Ack, it's going to take me days to get through all this stuff (digging / reading / playing with settings), and only then can I start loading on all the software I want installed. Groan.

Oh well, I think that I got my money's worth in the purchase, and the learning / tweaking time will be time well spent I'm sure. Now for the important stuff: off to see what games come with Vista.
^^