In fact Intel published this security information here.

there are new drivers available here.

I think you can use them instead of waiting until Dell lets you download them. Or are Dells drivers in any kind changed to fit the Inspiron notebooks?
Thomas

as far as I can tell, dell doesn't alter the intel drivers. most of us have always just used what's on intel's site. i'd recommend everyone do that. they're usually always newer.

the only time I've seen an OEM with newer drivers was IBM when they hosted a beta version of the 9 series drivers that solved a disconnect problem. Intel would give you the same drivers if you emailed them -- they just didn't host them directly.

So yeah, use the intel drivers.

You first!

I apologize,

I'm on Proset v 8.0.0 and device driver 8.0.12.12000

I'll have to upgrade Proset to v 10.5.0.0 and drivers to 9.04.17

I was hoping someone else would do it first and let us know how it went.

Capt

me first what? i've always used the intel drivers for the pro2200BG in my 5100. Only time I used OEM drivers were when I used IBMs before I learned that intel would email out the beta versions if you asked,

if they don't work out for you it's not a hard process to revert ... especially if you're just updating the drivers and not using/installing ProSet.

i think it will go fine for you. i haven't used proset in sometime but the upgrades were seamless when i did (minus one version with a bug where I had to uninstall the current first).

these days i just use 7-zip to extract the folder with the drivers and upgrade without using the installer or worrying about proset.

Intel does recommend using the OEM drivers over Intel's. Though considering Dell seems to lag behind by months WRT drivers it is probably best to install Intel's drivers now.

All I can say to Dell is hurry up and release you versions.

ATI recommends the same ... and i promise it's generally a bad idea to listen to either of them :)

I'm sure dell will get them up eventually. I'm equally sure they won't have changed anything important.

is it true that the driver files are rather on the large side, or have I got that wrong? I read somewhere that they are over 100 MB which for me would be a rather large download.

The new file is 130MB which is significantly larger than previous releases.

This is likely for several reasons:

1) The size always grows with newer versions it seems -- small upward trend

2) in an attempt to create a single package, intel has merged the seperate downloads for the 2200bg and 2915ABG with the newer 3945ABG.

3) They now support more operating systems with the same package -- notably x64 which would likely require a near doubling in file size.

Just FYI, the driver folder itself (for all operating systems) is only ~22MB uncompressed -- so you can tell that most of the room is going to various implementations of ProSet and the documentation.

thanks for your reply nemesis. I guess I'm going to wait a while and think about whether I want to download such a huge amount, it would probably take forever.

Well I upgraded to Intel's drivers on my Inspiron 9300 and all appears well.

Just a word of warning though. I don't use the Proset software (I used XP's build in software) so I uninstalled it which caused it to uninstall the driver for the wireless card. I managed to get that installed manually, but then quickset would keep crashing. Eventually I reinstalled the Proset software and then used it's entry in the add/remove control panel to remove all but the drivers and now everything is fine.
So basically don't uninstall all of Proset. If you don't use it, just disable the application part.

BTW I would recommend not running the Proset software if you have XP SP2. It just adds a bunch of processes to your system and XP can do everything that the Proset software does already. If you need to use WPAv2 just install the WPA V2 upgrade for Windows XP SP2 and Windows will handle it natively. No need for more bloat.

Morac -- that works or you can just uninstall Proset completely (or never install it like I did).

If you don't have ProSet and don't want it, you just take that monster file and open the file with a program like 7zip or win-rar (or probably even winzip). The drivers folder is pretty obvious. Extract the drivers folder to somewhere like your desktop and then just use the 'update driver' feature in device manager.

Done and done and no ProSet to then try to uninstall without also removing the drivers.

I'd only recommend this if you don't have or want ProSet. If you currently have Proset and want to keep it, you should upgrade to the latest version when you upgrade to the latest driver.

NemesisDB - I tried installing just the drivers using the device manager but it caused a lot of problems. First it told me the drivers weren't certified, but I ignore that, then the installation kept asking for a file that wasn't in the drivers directory so it never installed. I used the executable in the drivers directory which installed the drivers and got the device working fine, but then the Dell QuickSet program would crash whenever it executed (apparently it needs ProSet installed). So basically that's why I chose to install Proset and then remove all but the drivers.

Jec, if I had an easy way to host the 20MB drivers portion I would ... sadly I don't and my email limit's a lot smaller than that