Quote Originally Posted by Grinenshire View Post
You don't really have to. They usually toss a CD in with laptop that has all those nifties. The question is, will they also work properly? Believe it or not, but for some reason the hardware button controls and sound augmentations get buggy on foreign OSes.
<span style="color:#FFCCFF">
A) They don't always give a CD or the CD doesn't work or else they give you CD but it only came with a DVD player[not a combo] on the laptop, etc. As you can probably guess I haven't had much luck with laptops.

B) You are semi-right on that buggy bit. At least with HP you are. My old dell has no issues with any of it, no matter if I am using Win95,win98,winME, or winXP. Though I don't know how new dells handle it. Hmm.. My freind's Compaq Presario also doesn't care about the OS as long as it is a newer OS. My Dad's compaq(also a presario if I recall) also works regardless of OS(he has used 3 different OS's). I have also been told IBM(Lenova now?) laptops don't mind OS changes much.

The biggest issue with getting the utilities working is, in my experience, that they use slightly more resources then they do factory installed. However, the difference is much less than the resource difference between 98 and XP or XP and Vista.
</span>