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Does Dell's forum matter? Do a lot of people actually use it?
I once killed a forum. Ansyr's, on CEWindows, long before I was asked to moderate. It wasn't that I wanted to kill it, truly, but whenever I saw some poor soul who'd shelled out $50 for the horrid 'Primer' PDF viewer as I had, complaining of one of the many problems with the software, I just had to comment. So happens that my comments usually, or maybe always, linked to the free Adobe reader, a better product by far, and free. It took a few months, and Ansyr deleted quite a few of my posts (developers have moderator powers there, and Chris De Herrera, CEWindows' owner, was not aware of these abuses of that privilege), but eventually withdrew, as it was too embarrassing and probably hurt sales, a lot.
I'd suggest posting heavily on Dell's forum. Be polite, never confrontational, always honest. Embarrass them. Something might happen.
As for the upgrade of my X5 to WM2003, I looked around with Google for a few hours and tried to read Russian, German, Chinese... then found a perfect kit in Idaho. And no, I'll not be posting a link here nor offering one, which would contravene forum rules to which I agreed in joining Aximsite. I downloaded it over Wi-Fi (about 50MB compressed to a 30MB ZIP) onto the X5's SD card using EZDowrloader, dumped it to the PC, and an hour later was hunting down '03 versions of all my software. Search engines rock when OEMs don't bother to support users, as in the case with Dell's withdrawal of the upgrade. Illegal? Probably. Immoral? Nah. Dell's not selling it, except in the UK, to locals only. So no loss to them, unless one considers sales strategies of nefarious sorts to be something to honour. I'll not buy a new Dell just to get a minor OS upgrade, one which should cost $30. I'll also not send Dell $30 now. At my usual billing rate of $40 per hour, they owe me a bit for wasted time. I'll forgive that. WM2003 is nice!
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