Mine was the same way when I first got it. And it came with Windows ME. That didn't last long. After I wiped the drive and insatlled only what I wanted on top of Windows 2000, I rarely had problems. To date, the only incident that counts is a problem I had with my cordless mouse when I installed Service Pack 2, and that wasn't hard to fix. I stand by Dells as stable machines. Windows OSs are another matter, though. XP, both versions, are total crap.