Nothing on it? Or a bunch of stuff installed by Dell on it? - Sam Pullara

Sam: there's all the usual stuff installed by Dell. I need a Windows 7 DVD! :-) - Robert Scoble

Don't you have the latest RC candidate Robert? That should work I would think. - Altan Khendup

i say use linux and thunderbird - Sunny (The Geek Lord)

Robert, why don't you use Thunderbird ? it's free, lightweight and it has lots of plugins https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US... - امیرعباس

Microsoft needs to take control of their own support - Dell support sucks, and drives me away from Microsoft. - Jesse Stay

Have a client with a win 2003 server. It's needs OS re-installing. They've lost disks. Apparently MS don't offer OEM 2003 support anymore. the product key with the COA (obviously) doesn't work with the evaluation versions I was told by Dell to download from MS site. a third call to Dell support, and they 'find' some disks in stock after all. It was a whole day wasted though chasing around in circles. - Ian May

Faulty hardware, perhaps. Very common. Bad RAM, buggy BIOS and corrupted hard drives). - Kittyburgers

LOL. - Zachary TG

Three new motherboards later and I couldn't be happier with my Dell. Srsly. - A Mitchell

I've had more than my share of issues with various Linux distributions, too. Not sure who I should hate for that. - Jeff Harbert

everyone on freenode - Ian Tindale

I use Gmail these days. Outlook is nasty expensive bloatware, that I can't personally justify the cost of, and with Gmail, none of the sync nonsense required either. I do back it up locally, but not had to use that yet. - Ian May

Thunderbird sounds good but I think Opera client is worth a try 2 is so much nicer & with the browser 2. - polou/indigo_bow

hello robert - ramazan çekiç

Thunderbird is wonderful! I installed it on the fly (IMAP) during the last great Gmail outage with no issues - 1001 noisy cameras

I think its just outlook... never could get that be very stable on any machine, not since they loaded it up with so many things. - Matt Ellsworth

Outlook usually runs fine, but you're right in that it can be a bit finnicky if the main data file - PST file - is corrupt. Outloook can be run in safe mode without any addons if one of them is causing a problem. In my experience, a corrupt PST is the main cause of grief with Office Outlook, but is no more unstable than any other programme out there. - Kittyburgers from IM

Yeah, Linux is no better. Why, I remember Ubuntu crashing on me just last year. Not the OS, mind you, but gdm, so I was logged out. Or was that 2007? - Bruce Lewis

It's all the crap that these companies put on new PCs that is so tiresome. it's time wasting too, removing it all. - Ian May

Dell was good some years ago. Now they are average. Deinstall Vista. Choose XP. My new Dell is working stable since I did that. - Wulffy

ThinkPad, Vista and OpenOffice = works like a charm for me - Ronald

oh come on guys - Thunderbird is no Outlook, long way to go still - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

The latest batch of Dell Optiplex PCs which I installed had this queer 'feature' where explorer crashed on the first time that I tried to open the control panel. They then continued normally. Duh... - Adrian Scicluna

Now I've installed, for the first time, an iMac running OSX with Parallels and Vista. And for some reason Windows seems to work better under VM on an iMac. - Adrian Scicluna

Open Office may not be as feature-full as MS Office 07.. but then again, most people don't use more than 5-10% of all that Office 07 can do. - Adrian Scicluna

But then again, some people really need all those features. I do. Open is not an option for many people in a office environment. Besides, the issue was with Office Outlook 2007, as I recall. Not with Open Office. Who cares about Open Office - that wasn't what the thread was about. - Kittyburgers from IM

I don't like Outlook as 1. I can't justify the price. 2. it's slow. 3. it's bloated eye candy 4. I don't need it. - Ian May

does a new commercially bought PC with Windows and Software installed crash more than a commercially bought PC with linux or mac OSX? I'm not sure, perhaps it would be because typically there's way more installed and customized that can go wrong on first run. On the other hand my commercially bought HP with Linux could not be registered online or updated ("sorry, your serial number is not unique, tough luck") and I had to switch to a hand installed different distro, so I think the problem is more half baked standardized VAR-specific on-first-run configurations - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

I would agree with you on the price aspect, however, it is not really geared to individual users and is more of a business broduct and is included in the higher-end Office packages. It *can* be a bit so, but this is usually due to overly large PST files. On my machine with a 1GB PST file, it's still quite snappy, but on lower end machines, this can indeed be a problem.. I don't know about the boated eye-candy statement, though. I would disagree with you on that one. - Kittyburgers from IM

ok Kittyburgers. I used to use Outlook, but these days I simply don't need it. I prefer Gmail, and there's no darn sync nonsense. That is the main reason I moved away from local email. - Ian May

Higher-end Office packages?! It's included in Office Basic. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us... - Adrian Scicluna

It depends which market these licenses are sold. Office Basic 2007 is for system builders only with Offce Small Business and Professional 2007 trial. It is not sold retail. You must order it with a new PC. It is aimed at the small business user, not a home user. This is where the Home & Student version comes in. Office Outlook 2007's target users are in a business environment. This is what I meant when I stated higher-end packages. - Kittyburgers from IM

Stop buying Dell. The load it with crapware. My latest Lenovo was great. And my Velocity Micro. - Jeff (the メガマクダジ of FF) from iPhone

that's cuz we all know your old generation is pretty much computer illiterate - sofarsoShawn

my curent annoyance with MS is the helpful search technology they have added and kind of forced on me - by default it indexes too much, uses too many resources, and gets in the way... and i cant remove it... - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

Indexing shouldn't be taking up too many resources. Check the settings - you can adjust everything to suit your needs. Just type "index" into the start menu and you should see indexing options (on Windows 7, and I believe Vista as well) If you deal with many documents and emails, I would say that it's one of the best new features. Certainly for me, along with jump lists. - Kittyburgers

Learn how to use a computer, Scoble. Obviously you're doing it all wrong. - John Hardy

LOL! Try cleaning out your data file if you haven't, should do the trick.. - Ahad Bokhari

Try having 40 Dells in a classroom that are never consistent. Then add 200 online students with GOD KNOWS WHAT home systems. Can you say IT exec turned CompApps prof turned HelpDesk technician? LOL! - Brenda Rothaupt

They release products with extended beta's and once 60% of the "bugs" are worked out they charge you the 160$ for the service to continue. The people are getting educated this won't be in the future!! cs ostini - Christopher Scott Ostini