Another Day, Another OS Install

I seem to be doing a lot of these lately...

My mom's old computer has a lot of problems. When they moved back to California, instead of fixing it again, I bought her a new Dell laptop. Since then, I've been using the old Inspiron 600m on my LCD TV as a media player. However, due to whatever problem was there before, the computer runs really slow and crashes a lot. This morning, I copied off all the personal files on to a USB drive and now I'm going to reinstall the OS.

Hmm, the first step is to find the recovery disks. Not sure where they are... I have discs from newer Dell computers but not sure if they will work. Hopefully after the reinstall, it will run fast enough to stream movies via wireless.

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I found a Recovery CD app on the old Dell. Now it's unpacking and burning a CD for me. I think I'll just install Google Chrome and XBMC and nothing else on this computer.

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Hey, even better idea... I'm going to try and install Snow Leopard on the Dell notebook. This will probably be a complete waste of time but what the heck.

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OK, none of the three different guides I tried seems to work. Maybe I have the wrong OS X DVD. I'm back to trying to restore the original Windows XP OS now.

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The recovery disc creator kept giving me a CD burn error. After 4 CDs, I decided to give up and go with a mystery Dell OS disc. It turned out to be Win XP Media Center SP2 from 2005. That installed okay but did not include any drivers for the Inspiron 600m. I have to go to the Dell website to install a whole bunch of drivers. In addition, Windows is trying to install SP3 and about a million security updates.