Eagerly awaiting my new PC!!! What should be my first few steps??

[jay829husker]

By the way, it's my first post here. I just want this purchase to go very smoothly with very little bumps. It has been ages since I had a new computer... Any suggestions for me.

New PC

Pavillion Elite 180T w/ (2) 500 GB hard drives in data protection. Raid configuration.

Jay,

[lrb1]

Jay,

Sounds like you bought a killer machine. I have pretty much the same PC (Elite e9280t) although I have noticed that the base processor is  a couple of hundred MHZs faster than when I bought mine at the beginning of the year. The only issue I  have had is sleep related, nothing real major but when you spend good money and hard earned you expect everything to work as it was designed to. 

I think most if not all of the bugs have been worked out through motherboard revisions and BIOS updates. What is the motherboard that is coming on your machine? Just curious to see if they are still using the Pegatron Truckee and if so what revision. What kind of video card are you getting?

Good luck and congratulations!

Lawrence

[Big_Dave]

Don't boot it up until you take a complete image of the hard drive (all partitions) using a product such a Paragon Hard Disk Management Suite. Use Paragon's boot CD and take a complete hard drive image either to DVDs or an external device.  This image will will be the "pure" factory image.

Then boot up the PC and use the HP Recovery Manager to burn a set of DVD recovery disks.  You can only do this once unless you restore the hard drive using the image from the above process.  Use DVD+Rs such as Verbatim.

Then burn a HP boot diagnostic disk using the PC Help and Tools program -> Hardware Diagnostic Tools.

Check the bios level to ensure that you have the latest installed.

[lrb1]

Big_Dave,

I wish I would have done that. To this day I am still a little concerned about the Recovery Disks I made because it came out to 5 disks instead of the three it says it should take.

Lawrence