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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: orkrious who wrote (38367)	8/10/2005 8:59:32 PM
From: Roads End	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Just went through the same here at home 2 days ago. Get an external hard drive and use their software to export your data. Reformat and install OS. Not too bad and now I use the auto backup feature that came with the external drive to regularly back up.

To: orkrious who wrote (38367)	8/10/2005 9:01:01 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

sorry, but what was your original problem? i agree w/tooearly that Dell Tech Support is very quick on the trigger to reformat (otoh, it is very easy if you have one of their recent machines with the default config contained in a separate partition; only takes about 10 minutes to wipe the drive and get a OS). recently, i called and that was their "solution" for me. however, the original problem (inability to get the Add/Remove Programs list to populate, etc.) did not go away, even after reformatting. finally, i just unplugged an external USB drive (which turned out to be malfunctioning) and that solved the problem. so, i lost a bunch of data thanks to the reformat, and they could have solved the original problem if their troubleshooting guy had had the courtesy to tell me to disconnect all external devices. btw, i do not think Macs are the answer, either. i bought one the other day and it has been a huge PITA. i can't even figure out how to print just the highlighted area on a web page (any Mac experts out there, please let me know if there is a way). migrating something as basic as IE Favorites is a huge pain which Apple tech support told me is impossible (but i found a way). same for Outlook messages, etc.