Executive summary for those who don’t want to plow through the whole spiel: Amazon shipped (standard via USPS) my OEM WD RE3 from Amazon with the packaging in the picture below. Promised securely packaged replacement from Amazon came packaged exactly the same way, except one of the two air pillows was totally deflated. [...]

I tried to upgrade my XP SP2 installation to Vista RTM three times. Each time the installation made it through all the way to the final reboot when it died with a BSOD. This despite Microsoft’s Upgrade Advisor giving the green light. After the third failure, I ran Dell’s own Upgrade Advisor [...]