You will need to look at other Dells that support XP for possible drivers.

 

What programs do you use that are not Vista compatible?

 

I have had 100% success installing XP programs in Vista. The process for both the installation and the program itself is to go to the Compatibility Tab in icon Properties and set for XP Compatibility and also set the Run as Administrator box at the bottom of the page. You need to do this for both installation and program running.

See this thread for individual M1330 XP drivers, +/or there's a XP drivers pack for the M1530 on the Notebook Review forums ;)

Kirk - the program is a beast called embedded visual c++, and it's actually easier to dual boot.  MS doesn't support it any longer, but I still need it.

 

cg 

I would still try a Vista install using the XP Compatibility Mode.

The link to the "I cannot believe they removed the drivers" page was very helpful.  The suggestion to go the the Notebook Review former was the perfect.  For those of you doing battle with XP on the xps1530, much is to be learned.  My last issue was getting the wireless operational. This link solved my issue.

 

wireless 1505 N

 

As far as getting my development tools working with Vista, well, I might research it later.  Even installing in compatibility mode resulted in a series of disabled drivers, error reports and crashes.  I'm not antiVista by any means, but time is money for me.

 

Thanks for the links and suggestions. 

My 1530 came with Vista as default.  During Vista open beta tests I found that it is not compatible with Access 97.  I have many hours of development time in Access 97 database products and therfore have installed XP Pro SP3 on the machine.  I don't do development on the 1530 but I do use it for testing of databases.  There were other problem programs with Vista but I don't have a list anymore.

 

I'll never understand Microsoft's reasoning behind throwing away software compatiblity.  Couldn't be money I'm sure.

Well, I'm sure that part of the reason was to continue the revenue stream.  However, MS has been beat about the head for many, many years about security issues.  True, they had always maintained the compatability, but the cost was never being able to close the security gaps.  They were d'd if the did and d'd if they didn't.

 

For me, the issue is compatibility - my environment has so many different pieces to it that it just becomes impossible to pull together a stable environment.  Since I really wanted the xps rather than the latitude, I made sure that XP would run - took me a bit, but it works, and the laptop is smoking.

 

cg

 

p.s. - I also think there was another thought on MS' part.  Virtual machines have come of age.  And with dual and quad cores available, going that way with an XP installation into a VM is a real solution.