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On Thursday 01 February 2007 13:52, Rick Reynolds 
<rick@rickandviv.net> was heard to say:
It's probably worth getting a
larger hard drive and keeping a Dell-supported OS on there as a
dual boot option just so you can verify that any problems you're
having are not hardware related.
I have a Sony Vaio (don't get one, the hardware is unique and 
substantially under-supported) PCG-GRT170 laptop, and for the support 
issue (extended Circuit City warrantee, used 5 or 6 times for DVD 
drive failures) I restored WinXP to the original 5400rpm HD after I 
bought myself a 7200rpm HD with better seek times, transfer rates 
&etc, and put Unstable on that.
Now if I want that last little bit of hardware debugging: "Does it 
fail in Windows too?", I just swap HDs which isn't traumatic. It also 
keeps them from erasing my Linux install and putting XP back on it 
which they did once before I figured this trick out.