Odd Experience with Latitude E6500

I was plannnig to replace the M65 with a WUXGA E6500, so I bought one from Dell Outlet, which turned out to have BIOS Revision A11. All looked great on paper and the machine was cosmetically nice, but when I powered up to do the normal first-time install of XP SP3 (which I've done countless times, but with SP2), everything hung on the screen where you enter the computer name and description. Had to power down.

Eventually I stuck the XP disk in the optical drive, thinking I'd do a clean install, but I missed the prompt to boot from the optical drive, and this time the factory install worked just fine. Subsequent boots to XP then failed to produce the Windows taskbar and resulted in some ominous ControlPoint errors. But if I completely removed the optical drive or stuck any disk in it, Windows booted error-free.

Decided to send it back. I guess I could have played around with it but a quick internet search didn't turn up this particular problem and I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time on a new laptop.

Just thought I'd post this since the behavior seemed so strange. Of course, someone might already have posted something similar.

 

I would have opened things up, reseated hardware, booted to the Dell Diagnostic CD and let that bang on the hardware for awhile, and then clean install the OS. Seems like we need to do this for a new notebook anyway these days. If that did not go well, talk to Dell and/or send it back.

GK