Ok I have a unique situation here. I am a american living overseas in Germany. Which means I have to run all my american appliances through a transformer. It transforms the current from 220 to 110. Now here is the problem. I have a BRAND new Dell XPS 410 system with a 500 gig sata drive in. It also has the dual core chip in it. and 2 gig of memory. A week out of the box it started to make noise like the drive was powering down and then would go clunk. Call the pc manufacturer....described what was happening...They said they would send me a new drive out. I kept on using the old one till jsut the other day it finally would not boot up. It is also running windows vista. it would get to the black microsoft screen with the bar across the bottom and would not boot. I am a pc tech...So I ran a few diagnostics and the drive had read write errors. So on to the second part of this....I also recieved a external western digital Mybook 250 gig hard drive. Was using that today on my old system when it too started to make that powering down noise. I picked up the drive and listened to it and I could hear nothing. No sound nothing. So unplugged the drive...Drove up to the military base and picked up a new surge suppressor...thinking that might be the problem. Got a good one that will also telling me if the house has bad wiring and if it gets overloaded. I plug all my stuff into that and what do you think happens a few hours later???? It starts to make that powering down noise again. I am at my witts end. Not sure what to do. I have not had this problem with the old system. Just this one. Thought it could have been that I got shipped a system with a bad drive in it. But now it does not sound like because of the external drive acting that same way now...and they are two complete different drives by two different manufactures. the internal drive is also a sata drive. Not sure if that is needed info but thought I would include it. Can anyone help me. I spent tooo much money on this system to have it die on me. Plus already transfered about 100 gig of data that I can not lose onto the new external back up drive....how many back up drives do I have to have in order to protect my data???
Michelle
pss sorry so long winded.

I would suspect the main problem would be the power supply is built to run on 60 Hz while the EU Nations use 50 Hz. Your best bet would be to buy EU power supply for the comp. I am by no way an expert on these matters. Ask some one at the military base who works with electrical power supplies.

Thanks for your service.

I do not think it is the power supply. My older system an HP which is now about a year and a half old never had that problem. And the external hard drive has a power supply that goes from 110-220 automatically. To run that all you need is a adaptor plug. Which changes the end of the cord to a european plug.
Michelle