The more I use Windows...

So, my work laptop, which is only 3 months old, has been a little wonky lately, and got much worse when I installed MS Visual Studio today so I could, you know, do some work with it.

After the installation, it wouldn't launch applications from within Windows. I could double-click an app, or choose it from the “Start” menu, and the hourglass would appear for a couple of seconds, then turn back into a cursor.

So I decided to reinstall the OS. This was about a 3 hour process, interrupted once when I realized the “Dynamic Installation” step was hosed, but couldn't (despite the onscreen instructions) escape out of it. Finally got a clean install process, then Windows rebooted, and on reboot, “Windows Out-of-box Experience” threw a memory error (‘The instruction at 0x-hexaddress- referenced memory at 0x00000000. The memory could not be “written.” ’) Then it prompted me to log in, noticed that my copy of Windows hadn't been verified by the mothership yet, and launched the Windows Out-of-box Experience (msoobe.exe to its friends). Repeat as many times as you can stand it.

Frustrating thing 1: I already entered the 20-character key from the bottom of the laptop. Frustrating thing 2: It won't let me do anything until I'm “verified” by the boys in Redmond. Frustrating thing 3: There's very little installed on this machine that didn't come from Microsoft itself or from Dell. I find myself force-quitting two programs in particular every time I want to reboot: ipoint.exe (Microsoft's mouse driver for my MS mouse) and itype.exe (Microsoft's keyboard driver for their ergo keyboard).