Finally got my Dell Notebook up and running

Early today(9:00am..ish) a contract technician representing Dell came over and got to work on my machine. He first changed the optical drive and booted from it.. using the vista disc. we selected the "repair windows" option, but it just got stuck on the "looking for installed OS...something something" finally he advised me to just swap the old hard disc with a fresh new one.. instal vista on it. I'd have a week to recover what data i want from the other hard disc and then i have to return it to Dell. Sounded like a good plan(minimal risk to any of my precisous data) so we went for it. Got done installing the OS and drivers by around 11:00am, and so he left.

i went out and got myself an external hard disc and a transcend Shock resistant Hard disc for future backups.

The old hard disc works in the external case, so am now copying all my data back to my system, and have backed up all my office work on the transcend HDD... now vista is running some updates... have to remember to instal servicepack1 ... whenever it gets done with this...(hoping the service pack is not one of these updates :wait: that would take forever)

once thats done i'l get down to installing my software and apps... so i can start working on it tomorow..will install the games tomorow evening.
I had a bunch of games on the old hard disc, thankfully i'd finished most of them: Bioshock, gears of war, Frontlines, Crysis, Timeshift...so will probably not instal them now.

will have to instal Witcher and Crysis and start from scratch...if i can't salvage my old game saves from the messed up hard disc (fingers crossed) .