A friend of mine had me look at his Dell 4550 becuase it was running slow. I booted up and it took an absolute eternity to get to a desktop and once there everything was insanely choppy and it was rendered almost completely useless. I reformatted and installed Windows XP, but the installation is taking a very very long time. Several hours at least. I have not booted it up to a desktop becuase it is not finished installing. Will it likely be alright once XP is installed? What might be the cause of this slowdown? Thanks, Ryan

I took a look at a Dell 4550 on the web, and it seems to be a pretty good machine and very recent. Therefore, it should not take very long to install XP at all, and if its taking that long to install, it will probably run just as slow. A couple suggestions: 1) Go into the bios, and reset everything back to the "default" settings. Not fail-safe (if it has that option). Changing BIOS settings can really impact performance. 2) Call Dell. It seems like a recent machine and probably is still under warranty.

It's inevitable. Slow Ram Speed. Part of Marketing, time for a new dell? to be constructive, I would reset the bios from the jumper on the motherboard. You can take out the little Silver Battery if you can't find the jumper, wait a few seconds and put it back and try again.