I bought a Dell Studio XPS 13 laptop a couple of weeks ago, running Vista Home Premium SP2. All seemed fine except for a number of random error messages which only occurred once or twice each, nothing consistent to follow-up. I thought maybe this was a memory fault and ran the various checks available under Vista and the Dell software. No memory faults were reported but I did get a different value for “physical memory installed” depending on what I used to check with.

There is 4GB installed but this is reported as 2.2GB or thereabouts mostly (4GB via “Control Panel/System”).

I called the Dell helpline and they offered to change the memory and motherboard, which was done within 2 days, excellent service there.

But with the new m/board and RAM nothing has changed as far as memory reporting is concerned.

Now I’ve found on another forum that “Windows 32 bit splits the 4GB of available memory address
space into two separate 2 GB address spaces. One of the 2GB address spaces is used by the Windows operating system and the other 2GB address space is used for user applications”. But wait a minute; my desktop (same OS) has 3GB and all checks say that it has 3GB. This is a contradiction, so what’s going on here, can anybody tell me what I should expect?

I don't have much confidence now in either the Dell Helpdesk or the Unisys technician, who both should know but apparently don't.
 
One thing that has changed is that before the “repair” the screen was less bright on battery than on mains, seems logical, power saving and all that. Now I have a brighter screen on battery, it dims as the power plug goes in – what’s going on here? Maybe one of you has a XPS and can confirm how this should work. I’ve tried all the power saver settings and can’t find anything to change this, anyone know of a solution?

And the third issue doesn’t seem to have a solution judging from various forum postings. This is when I try to open “Control Panel” and I get a “Windows Explorer Not Responding” message, I close and it normally opens on the second attempt, no biggie, but annoying. Forums say this was fixed under Vista SP1, seems it came back under SP2? Anyone else with this issue? Any solution?

So three issues bothering me, can some of you knowledgable guys please help me out here?