PhotoDude.com

I don't think it's a virus. Sounds to me as if you simply haven't been putting it through enough changes or tweaking it enough. I suggest you visit the Dell forums to see what others are doing. There are some very entertaining posts there such as "Help!!!! AOL ate my passwords and now I don't know how to reinstall windows!!" and "I tried to boot my computer and nothing came up, so I put the disk in and tried to format it, and now it's making a funny noise..." After a week in there, you should be able to get it running right.

In all seriousness, not rebooting and staying connected with the same IP for 12 days ended up causing a problem. Two sites I frequent were switched to different servers by their host. Due to some arcane DNS table dilemma, and my dynamic-IP-made-static, those two sites stopped updating in Mozilla ... but not in IE. Pages I could see fine in IE would get a "404 Page Note Found" error from the server in Mozilla. I rebooted, got a new IP, and all the new content appeared in Mozilla. Strange, but true. And by the way, my new Dell has been flawless. Any problems encountered have been inbetween the keyboard and the chair. I didn't even know they had forums.

That's interesting. I have a static IP and every once in a while I encounter 404 errors that shouldn't be there (in both browsers). At least now I know where to start looking, but rebooting won't help in my case. I actually learned a lot in some of the Dell forums, but some of the posts are pretty funny too. Probably the biggest thing I learned is "Richard Don't Tweak!!" It runs nicely right out of the box and it's so integrated that tweaking can cause some serious damage, unless of course, you're a Pro (there's the rub - we all know what serious Pros we are). It even gets slightly faster after the first week or two as it figures out your habits and compensates. There are some violent arguments in the Dslreports.com forums over whether to use Dr. TCP to adjust MTU/Rwin, as XP dynamically adjusts it depending on your connection variables. So far, I've left that toy in the package too.

You know, I wondered about making any DSL tweaks, but I decided I'd wait and see if I could tell any connection differences. If anything, it's a touch faster. My KB/sec rates seem the same or slighter better than before, so no tweaks for me.