The Dell Latitude D430 is a solid worker bee but the Vista Basic installed on it is not. Over time, the operating system becomes slower and slower - it takes approx. 7 min. for a complete boot from start. This becomes a good reason to install the new Windows 7 (RC) to see if performance is improved. This is a good weekend pastime. The installation was done from an external USB DVD Writer (generic brand) and installation is a breeze. All hardware was recognized saving a lot time trying to reinstall drivers. I hate driver installation because sometimes we need to install in a particular order to get things work. (Dell Recovery/Driver CD does not have an automatic installation scripts that would install the drivers.) But again this is not an issue because all hardware was recognized - even the Security (Trust Computing Platform) After basic installation, I have installed some key software that makes the laptop capable of doing some real work. 7-zip AVG Free 8.5 K-Lite Mozilla Firefox + Th
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