I recently reviewed my new laptop, the Dell Studio XPS. I gave it a strong thumbs-up, but I may have spoken too soon. Soon after arriving, the laptop started acting up; bluescreen crashes became regular occurrences, then it started freezing at random times.

I contacted Dell support for help. To the company’s credit, tech support was for the most part knowledgeable and fast. We ultimately determined that there was corruption in the Windows Vista operating system, and a complete hard-drive wipe and re-install was necessary. Not fun at all, but worth a try.

Those are things I can do myself, so I did them, including re-installing a host of drivers I knew very little about (drivers are tiny programs that tell your hardware how to interact with your operating system). That seemed to cure the problem, but alas, it was only a tease; after another day or two, the problems (crashes, freezes) came right back. Grrrr.

I wasn’t about to go through another re-install. I told Dell to ship me out another unit, one with a properly-installed operating system. I got the new computer this afternoon, and have been installing programs like Microsoft Office yet again and using it all afternoon and evening. So far, so good; it looks like (knock on plastic) this one might be a keeper (of course, I’m undoubtedly jinxing myself by even saying it.)

My lessons learned from this: computers can be fragile things. Back up your data often (and hit “Save” often). Just because you spend a lot on a gadget, it doesn’t mean it will work out of the box (although you should be able to trust that). And Dell’s tech support, at least in my case, was very good.

I know others have had poor experiences with Dell support, but mine has been just the opposite. Yeah, I wish they’d built the computer right the first time, but they worked hard to solve the problem, and were unfailingly polite. That doesn’t often happen with computer-related tech support these days.

Anyway, I’m now happy with my Dell purchase. I hope to have another positive report in the near future.