Dell Resource CD is a Drivers and Utilities disc included with all Dell Desktops and Portable computers, its main purpose is to provide drivers, however it includes a set of tools that could help you troubleshooting and restore your system, version 4.5 is the lastest released and its the one you ll find in all Dell computers since 200.
Among the tools included, its a bootable disc that contains a dos based hardware diagnostics, the best part of this feature is that you can run a quick, extended or symptom based tests for different system issues such as noise, boot issues, network card problems, etc. The bootable disc also include an option to boot directly to pure dos instead of the dos emulation included on Windows XP or the lack of DOS of Windows Vista, this allows you to run old schools commands such Fdisk, Format or Debug.
The user interface looks old fashioned even now that Dell have improved a lot on end user experience, it doesnt autodetect your system hardware like other competitors discs and doesnt display drivers in the correct installation order, something that can cause some headaches. Besides that, you need to do at least 3 click before installing the driver (and Im not counting that you need to extract the driver before install it, which takes like 3 clicks more) and ironically you cant see the download button at lower resolutions such 800x600 or 640x860 which will be the most common scenario if you have just reinstalled Windows.
Comments (4)