Looking into the crappy Flash performance again.  When using Hulu desktop full screen things start out a little jerky and over time it gets way too jerky to watch. If I switch back and forth between windowed & full screen it works fine windowed but really never gets back to the initial minimal (yet still crappy) jerkiness. Watching Hulu in Windows Explorer seems to be a lot better - it's always a little jerky yet watchable in full screen but never deteriorates the way it does with desktop.

Hulu in Windows Explorer:

Hulu Desktop:

And Youtube 1080:

So the fan noise hasn't decreased at all.  I was giving it some time to see if it would go away but no luck.  I ran the fan test:

F12 at boot
Boot to Utility Partition
Custom Test
Fan

And here are the results:

It is definitely the CPU fan that makes the high-pitch whine.  The whine ramps up when the CPU fan ramps up and ramps back down with it.  The tests show "pass" but that only verifies the fan speed and has nothing to do with fan noise.  I'll be contacting Dell to either send me a new fan or someone to swap it.

Hulu was pretty crappy - dual CPUs loaded >85% but not pegged at 100% when running full screen 1920x1080.  At full screen the video jerks a lot and audio gets out of sync. Running in a windows the audio/video sync up and the video stabalizes, CPU usage drops to around 50% for both cores. 

I updated to the Catalyst driver using Mobility Modder and then the Flash 10.1 beta - that's supposed to enable hardware acceleration for Hulu flash.  Doesn't seem to have done much for Hulu but it did render my CCC non-functional.  Hulu is still >85% at full screen but seems a little less jerky.

Tried and tried to get the Xiph codecs working for FLAC but no luck.  I uninstalled them and installed madflac - works fine.

Also installed the tag support pluging.  WMP12 recognizes & plays FLAC now, but it lumped all songs into an "unknown" folder.

For video, installed Media Browser & metabrowser.  Ripped DVD ISOs show up but I can't get any metadata loaded.  metabrowser can't find anything for the few ISOs I have ripped so far.  Feh, what a pain in the ass.  The ISOs play at least.

Installed a signal boosting antenna on my HDHomeRun and now I get decent reception on 10 local channels.  Signal strength is upper yellow on most and green on one station.  Watching the bowl games to day things look okay but not fantastic.  The grass is pretty blocky.