years ago, i had an e-machine computer. i believe it ran xp. at that point in time, the only "fix" that i knew of was to reinstall the o.s. well, i did that so many times, that it actually caused something to fail inside the computer, and after 3 tries of 2-4 hour phone calls with e-machine, they finally told me to box it up, and send it back. they sent a call tag (thankfully) and 2 weeks later, i got it back. i remember that they replaced the hard drive, and something else. so besides the hours and hours and hours of reinstalling things, it can be done to excess. this poor old machine has had the o.s. reinstalled roughly 4 or 5 times. and every time, its more of a pain to do. because the amount of data i have to reinstall just keeps growing. and the number of fixes that microsoft keeps installing. imo, the Vista o.s should be on service pack 3 by now. or, better yet, a free update to windows 7. it really does take me a day and a half to reinstall the o.s. and restore all the other software and data. this has a 320gb hard drive, and i thought that was huge. when the first terabite drive came out, i thought who in the world will ever need a drive that big. this drive is about 2/3rds full. 2 things i know i want on the next computer will be a 1TB hard drive minimum, and a usb 3.0 to speed up data transfer. and the first upgrade to it will be as big of a cloud as i can possibly afford. anyway, getting back to this one, it runs Vista Home Premium. which is as dated as the machine, because vista was new when the computer was. i had forgotten to run chkdsk. i will give that a shot. it WILL take a while!
