Mark I went to an HP XP 3 or 4 years ago and I was disappointed from the word go.I finally found out that HP put all of there crap into there own product and removed a bunch of microsoft pages that you need.To give you an idea what they did to load there program it took 8 disc and it was all garbage.I have a friend who is an excellent computer person so he went in and deleted nearly all the crap that they had insstalled and my computer started to work like it should.I've also found out since that time that Dell and Gateway does the same thing so the first thing I'd do is find out how many disc it takes to load all the programs that you don't need or want that Dell has installed on there own product Louie Roy