Well, had a bit of an adventure this morning with my laptop. I recently (back in December) purchased a new laptop (Dell Inspiron 9200) which is a great machine in my experience and have been more than happy with it thus far. This morning I was working when the electricity went out, no problem, the battery kicked in. I shut down as I went to see why we lost power. When I came back about 20 minutes later after the power had been restored, I see the laptop still had not shutdown, it was stuck trying to end some program (don't recall which at the moment). I ended it normally and the machine shut down seemingly without problem. I then restarted and again walked away. 15 minutes later came back to be greeted with a blue screen. No biggie, I just rebooted again to see if it would just go away as I've seem them do from time to time. No such luck, blue screen again. Booted up in safe-mode, which came up OK, so I assumed that a driver had just been damaged in some way. After a bit of digging, I figured it was my wireless card that was causing the problem. It is a Dell 2200BG that came standard with the machine when I purchased it. Disabled the card and booted up normally with no problem. Removed the card from device manager and rebooted, XP detected the new hardware and reinstalled the driver, rebooted again, blue screen...arggghhhhh. Went and downloaded new drivers from Dell (they had been an update since I received my machine). Installed the driver, seemingly only halfway through the install, got the blue screen again. Thinking now that perhaps the wireless card itself had been damaged in some way, I started looking for my information to contact my rep with Dell. Meanwhile, rebooted and low and behold, the wireless now worked.
While I'm happy it's back up and running without having to have a service call into Dell, it does make me a bit nervous that not everything was installed properly even though I don't see any problems as of yet.