Back in August 2005 I bought a Dell 700m Inspiron notebook computer. It’s been absolutely great.

After much prodding and convincing from several friends I finally installed Ubuntu on my laptop. The installation was super easy and I’ve now got a dual boot running on it.

As Windows tends to do, Windows has been getting rather sluggish lately. No, I don’t have any viruses, spyware, or other crap on here, but it’s just not as fast as it used to be. I’ve been wanting to re-format for a while, and now that I’m getting more into Linux I’d also like to allocate more space to it. Dell has a hidden system restore partition that takes up about 4GB. On a small laptop with a 80GB hard drive that’s a pretty good chunk. I didn’t get a Windows XP installation CD when I bought my laptop, but if I’m gonna be re-formatting and blowing away the system restore partition I want to have a way to re-install Windows again. Say what you will about Windows, but I like it. I’m far from being a complete linux convert, though it could happen some day.

Anyway, I called up Dell Customer Service and after waiting on hold for 10-15 minutes (not bad at all I think) I was talking to a very helpful woman with what sounded like an Asian accent. I told her what I was doing and that I was hoping to get a Windows XP installation CD. After running me through some standard procedures and asking some questions (my name, service code, etc.) she said she was mailing out the installation CD along with copies of all the other CDs that originally came with my laptop. Oh yeah, she also said that if they don’t arrive tomorrow that they should be here by Monday. Dang! How’s that for customer service?!

I am happy. My next computer will be a Dell.