Dells Little Monster Parte Deux

Ok, so I call dell support because it's still happening. And we discover the most fascinating thing. The windows service pack 3 has "compatability issues" with dell computers. Specifically , as we discovered, that the reformat from the hidden partition didn't work.

We spent about an hour or so on the phone, the tech was sure it was the speakers for some reason. But uninstalled the service pack , and went down the list of windows wave files until we identified the beeping as the device installed / device uninstalled sound.

And then the battery on my phone died.

but , as I discovered, the reformat utility now worked again ! Hurray ! Note to self : never install service pack three again.

And I reformatted and reinstalled.

And it happened again . And my mouse froze. And I was soooooo ticked that this "device unplugged" sound was going off....hmmm...press the windows key on the keyboard, and the menu popped up. Ok , so windows wasn't frozen , just the mouse. Check the connection ?
Trace the connection to my computer. Nope ! Trace the connection to my old KVM box (keyboard video mouse) where you plug in one monitor , one keyboard, one video , and you could hop back and forth between two computers. Pull the power on that , put it back in , the mouse works !
five minutes later it happened again.
Completely bypass the KVM entirely and plug the mouse and video directly into the computer.
And it hasn't happened since.
I spent two days reformatting windows three times for a stupid failed KVM ????
Open up my new browser and type in my blog site so I can record my stupidity for all to see.
Hmm..keyboard isn't working.
Yep. Keyboards plugged into the now powerless KVM. Move it to the computer, works fine.
*sigh*
Well...for a device with only a 90 day warrenty I got about two years out of it , didn't I ?

Stupid McAfee Trick.

McAfee wouldn't uninstall , because it kept complaining the virus scanner was running all the time. Thats why I was cheating with sabataging files and everything in the first place.
Saw that message , AGAIN ! and was totally ticked...looked down at the system tray , saw the big M , clicked on it , ....virus shield..... you know. The old mcafee from Dos had a vshield program that was a TSR (terminate stay resident) that always ran in the background ....
yep. Turn off the virus shield. The uninstaller for mcafee runs problem free.
*sigh*
Oh and Windows Mediaplayer 10 ? Was there from the moment I reinstalled. Guess it came with the system and didn't secretly download despite the automatic updates being turned off as I thought.
*sigh*