Did you contact Dell about your hard drive issue? It would be very weird to see a hard drive die after a few months, espcially from a high classed company like Dell. I would think it might just have been one of those unlucky hard drives that were bad from the start, and things kind of fell into place.

Also you bought it from Dell, did it not come with ANY AV software? I have seen people have 4 (yes seriously 4) different AV programs installed on their computer and it cause problems.

And speaking from personal experience, I always have issues with computers being store bought from a name brand. Don't know what it is, if it just is all the unneeded software that seems to make the computer slow or what, but I always do a clean install of striaght XP and then load everything from there. That way you know what's installed and don't have to deal with any junk software.

Just a thought...
~AciD