Inspiron 9400/E1705 successful upgrade to Windows 10

The legacy AGP driver for the Radeon 9XXX card from vista works fine if you have that option.

Thanks. To be honest, I don't remember what video card is in there, but I'll check into it.

Started getting strange behaviour of laptop booting up to black screen with blinking mouse cursor. No welcome screen or login screen, just this black screen.

Only happened on boot up from shutdown state, didn't happen on restarts.

I was able to hit the power button to cycle and could get to login.

Some google searches later and my fix was to turn off "fast startup" under Power Options. Symptom gone, so far, and no discernible impact to startup time.

Thanks for the updates on updating the e1705. I am debating about updating from Windows 8, and don't want to see any performance degradation.  I noticed with upgrades it usually runs great immediately after an upgrade but than starts degrading. Is it still running fas

You are partially right. With all three of my old machines, including the E1705, initial speeds were OK. After several months, as you have stated, speeds declined. However, the speed declined mostly during boot-up or coming out of sleep. Initial boot from the Dell logo to the Desktop was fine; the best boot times vary from 10-20 seconds for all my machines, but are not consistent. From the Desktop to a useful state where CPU usage drops from 100% to usable levels, times have increased. Most likely, as you proposed, additional "features" from MS are causing these lengthened. This happens with my newest and fastest machines, but the degradation is not nearly as bad. Tracking via the Task Manager shows a number of OS programs running that I never saw with other OSs. OS updates seem to always being downloaded during the early stages. Once the junk has finished, operations are not bad, and even the E1705 runs fairly good. The biggest problem I see is browser operation. Chrome and Edge are both bad. They take a while to load, and Chrome still has about 8 appearances in the Task Manager.

The E 1705 now can not be put to sleep. This happened with a recent update, and I haven't been able to resolve the issue. Sleep has completely disappeared everwhere you normally would see it.

As I said performance send equivalent to Win 8. When wirelessly streaming video via Chrome, the old M1530 is actually better than my Compac. True in both Win 8 and 10. Go figure!!

hmm. Not quite as straight forward as I was hoping for.  Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds like you are saying that the performance is about equivalent, minus the sleep function, but that you have to keep messing around with it more than when it was on Win.8.

If I understand this correctly, I may hold a little longer.  If anything changes significantly one way or another I hope you can post again.  Thanks again!  Lawrence

No. The only major problems I have had were the lack of a video driver, which is more Nvidia's issue than Microsoft's, and the recent sleep problem, Microsoft's problem. After the longer than usual boot issue, performance is OK. I haven't had to really do any other fooling around. I always spend more time with a new operating system looking for issues. I do this on all six of my machines. The issue with the browsers is more related to having only 2GB of RAM. The E1705 is "officially" limited to 2GB, but some have been successful with 4GB. I never went this route because the laptop was used mostly by my wife, who did not do much other than e-mail and web browsing, and who is not as critical of slower performance. She currently uses a Samsung Android tablet, as she didn't like her Asus Windows 8.1 tablet.

I would certainly not use the E1705 as my primary computer. All my six have specific locations and duties.

Remember, that soon you will not be able to avoid the upgrade easily. MS is dedicated to eliminating all older Windows versions. except XP and Vista (at least for now!!!).

I liked Win 8.1 a lot, but 10 has it beat. I just wish Microsoft would do a better job of supplying a new OS instead of issuing a partially finished product. There has been one major update, with a second this month and a third soon after.

okay, I tried the upgrade to Win10 on my e1705 and it seemed to go well, but after a couple of weeks we noticed that when we are in a video chat we cannot do any other activities.  The processor seems to lock up and only can do the video chatting; it  even takes a few minutes to do a google search!

I tried installing the Intel Window Vista driver for Intel 945G graphics card that I had and it seemed to work better but the problem returned the same day.  Any ideas so I can multitask while in a video chat on Win 10?

Thanks for your help!

When I used my e1705 for video conferencing/chat on Windows 7 I had to remove unnecessary start-up services and minimize the concurrent usage of other apps to get reasonable quality. Memory/processor constrained.As I recall the laptop had 2gb of memory installed.

Also had some success adjusting video/audio quality options in whatever client to reduce resource utilization. Again, this was under Windows 7.

I did not try any video chat following the upgrade to Windows 10 as I gave the laptop to a friend shortly after the upgrade, but I'm guessing there would be similar constraints to start with.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for the feedback.  Although I never had Windows 7, I did not have this problem under Windows 8.  I have 4Gb installed RAM and it does recognize the full 3.25 GB (as restricted by my 32 bit processor/OS).

Anyone else have success at this, especially using video Chat?  Thanks!

Can't help on Video Chat, but my E1705 with 2GB RAM and the GS 7900 video runs fairly good once it has gone through the Win 10 startup garbage. All my old machines perform the same. Once stable (low CPU activity) performance is not bad. It can take 10 minutes or more to stabilize, longer if it has been off for a while; Win 10 Update is a real spoiler! I would use the Task Manager to monitor CPU and RAM usage before and during video chat. You may have processes running that are really hogging the CPU. I can stream video with no problems, even on my single core D9100.

I agree with KirkD's counsel on the "startup garbage" and possible impacts.

I should have included reference to that in my original comment about startup services. That original reference was to those persistent services initiated at startup; his, I believe, is more about those transient ones that startup and that then close when completed (like Win 10 Update). Both can definitely hog CPU.

There are several processes that show up in Win 10 that I never saw in earlier Windows. They are very hoggy in the older machines, but not a problem in the new, faster ones. The worst is "Runtime Broker", which apparently checks for updates as one of it's chores.

only issue is detecting another monitor.