There's a utility called "Dell De-Crapifier" to remove the bloat, if you want to try that... sounds like it should work on any PC.
New Dells come with a $10 option to include the installation disks. Presuming the Windows XP disk is separate, you can reinstall Windows and not install all of the bloat.
New Dell 3100 2.8 ghz Pentium4, 1GB ram, 19 LCD, 80 GB HD, & DVD for $449. Add $25 for a 3 year warranty with the rebate. http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=S50501c&cs=04&dgvcode=ss&c=US&l=EN&s=bsd
That's an interesting deal on the 3100. I notice it has only 2 pci and 1 pcie-x1 slots. I will run 3 monitors for sure and possibly 4. I'm not up to speed with the pci express thing. Does this box have room to run 2 dual cards? Is there a known reliable pcie 1x dual card? Any suggestions on video cards for this box? I'm going to assume *genuine* ati as gnome says, but my computer skills not that great, so better to ask... Also I have an old (never used) WD 40GB 7200 ATA drive to possibly add for acronis backup. This should work, right? Thanks, trend (BC)
This is a real pest. That's one of the reasons I only used motherboards to build my PC's. This saved me lots of headaches with hp/compaq, dell and like bloatware crap. I only touch clean Bios. This becomes a problem right now with the very low pricing of bloatware based crap.