OK, Now that the dust has (almost) settled and everything came out OK, I can share a story from last week, with a MAJOR word of caution.

A customer brought in a Dell Inspiron 1501 processor. The more I find out about these things (sadly, I own one), the more I am convinced they are overpriced, overhyped pieces of garbage. The computer had been running slowly and we didn't detect a problem when it came in earlier for repair.

The problem was that the CPU usage spiked to the 90-100% range as soon as Internet Explorer was deployed. Repeated A/V and antispyware scans showed nothing. Disabling all startup programs, antivirus and firewalls did not affect the massive CPU usage. We went through the running processes item by item and found nothing to give us concern. The only thing we did find was that the computer was reading only a single core of the dual core processor (a problem I have with mine and which, unfortunately, I just may have to bear).

So we attempted driver updates and tried to flash the BIOS.

Big mistake.

HUGE mistake.

Just for the record, consider a Dell Inspiron 1501's BIOS non-flashable. Because a failure will destroy your motherboard, something we found out the hard way (why Dell even SUPPORTS a BIOS upgrade on its site is beyond me at this point!)

Fortunately, we were able to get Dell to recitfy what should be regarded as THEIR mistake and issue a replacement mobo and RAM. But this happened last Friday afternoon, and I was pretty upset about the whole thing. I called it a day shortly afterwards, resolving to finish working on it after the weekend. After all, when you reach a certain point, it's better to grab a cold beer and deal with it later, I've found.

I'm just very glad I'm not a doctor. If "losing" a computer shakes me up like this, I'd hate to see what happened if I lost a patient!