So, I’m going to post a few links here about the problems I had and where I found the resolutions.  I’ve installed Windows 7 64bit on a Dell Dimension 9150 with 4gb ram.

Wired Ethernet connection kept dropping and showing up as “Unidentified Network”

This was strange.  I would be sitting and working and then the connection would go down and it would take about an hour of faffing about to get it to come back up.  I found a lot of different possible fixes for this, but none of them worked.  I was having simultaneous trouble with my Orange Livebox at the same time (I was never sure which was the culprit). 

This problem was eventually solved by disabling the Bonjour service used by Apple.  I’m a bit annoyed by this, as I have some applications that use it—but it’s not nearly as annoying as having to chase down a problem with my network adaptor ever couple of days.

PC would not hibernate without rebooting. 

I would try to hibernate and the machine would reboot and switch back on.  I depend on hibernate because I need my machine to turn on at different times of the night to perform backup tasks on my web servers.

The problem had to do with my mouse having the ability to wake up my pc.  The problem is outlined here.

Skype Freetalk Everyman Headset would not always work.

I bought the Skype Freetalk Everyman USB headset to use with Skype.  It works great—when it does work.  I had a problem where the PC would only identify the headset about 40% of the time.  The Freetalk website is absolutely rubbish and there are a lot of people out there (as I’ve seen in forum after forum) who can’t get this to work either.

I fixed this by installed an application called “Universal Link” which I downloaded from the InstoreShop Support pages.  This was incredibly difficult to find.  I don’t know why there is no way to find this from their home page.  I noticed that my product was called TALK-5115 on my invoice and searched on that.  I found a driver on this page.  It seems to work fine now.

I hope this helps someone.  I spent hours looking for solutions to these problems.  My laptops haven’t suffered any of them.  Now, my only concern is the fan kicks into high speed far too often for my liking . . .

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