XPS m1730 and win xp

Question

Hi y'all m1730 owners,   To save you the trouble that I gone tru, even calling the xps support in Ireland, here's a few things about the machine and Windows Xp Pro 32 bit I'd like to share with everybody:   The Xps is delivered with Vista installed and of course nothing works like you thought it would and you want to fall back to your good old and trusted XP. NO PROBLEM WHATSOEVER, if you just keep a few things in mind. If you want to boot from cd, the SATA RAID drives won't be detected by the install process so you need to create a new Windows boot disk. The driver you need to integrate is the 'Intel(R) 82801HEM SATA RAID I/O Controller, which is one of the drivers in the package, to be obtained via the driver downloads section. Have a service pack 2 executable, if you don't, download it from Microsoft. Have a clean Xp install cd. Check the internet how to slipstream sp2 onto your Xp installation etc. There's many sites devoted to how to do this. Download and install Nlite and add the mentioned Sata Driver to the install, using the Nlite manual on how to do this. It's very easy really. Burn the cd Now Xp will install. After installation use the Dell support disk to install the mainboard and video drivers no prob! Getting the audio to work, however, is a different story: Download the latest driver from Dell support and install. Remember the location where you installed it. In your hardware configuration screen, there's still 2 unknown pci devices. 1 of them is the Ageia, the other is the soundcard. This is the odd part. Change driver for the device and point to your audio driver download map. Now it works and you just install the rest of the drivers. The ageia is also not detected, but installing it's driver will recocnize it automatically. I had the system in my possesion for a week before everything worked, giving me quite a bit of headache. I'm just posting this so maybe you guys do't have to go thru all this hassle. Furthermore I'd advise everybody to create a ubcd4win(google this) bootdisk, which also needs the Sata Raid driver for creating. This way you can create and load xml images and have a lot of other useful tools at your disposal. I would create a xml image as soon as you have a fully installed and updated system. Good luck and happy laptopping

Ls3D · Answer

'The Xps is delivered with Vista installed...' I ordered mine with XP Pro SP 2 installed and have had no problems. Perhaps your post will help those who change their mind. -Shea

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