Those downloads are placed in your account so that you can download them and burn them to a CD or DVD, just in case your hard drive crashes and you need to reinstall everything.  Dell does have a restore partition on the original hard drive, but that is only useful if the hard drive itself is ok.  If the hard drive fails and you find the need to replace it, having those files on external media is the only thing that will allow you to recover your system.
I was checking for any available downloads and came across My Download Locker in my Dell account. I recently bought a new Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop with windows 7. Everything extra I ordered is installed and working fine. In my locker however it says I have several downloads remaining, but they are downloads I ordered to be installed in the computer. Like McAfee for example, it's working fine and was already installed when I got it, but it says there's 3 downloads remaining. What are these and should I download them? They are pretty big, this one is 178,976 KB's. Again, these are in My Download Locker. I'm a little confused about these downloads..... Thanks in advance for any help... ROK 
Question on Downloads...