You will be fine without step 6 as you have loaded Windows. The SATA drivers are for preinstallation only. You will see my note there:

"An important additional note about the SATA drivers. Although I have never needed to carry out this step on any of my installs, I notice alot of people having difficulty due to SATA drivers. They have errors which state there is no hard drive or a CD/DVD device is missing."

There may be some SATA applications to install at the end with the system drivers however.

It will be step 5 and 10 you are having issues with. Can you tell me what drivers you have installed? What make is your model, there a re a few Studio XPS systems and if you know in particular what Video Card and Wireless Card you have?

Studio XPS 8100

Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 5450, 1024 Mb

Ethernet Controller (that's all it's telling under System Info, and I'm not using a wireless network)

I've downloaded everything from Step 5. and attempted to install them, but with most of them I get a TSDNWIN flash download window that keeps telling me the file is not opened?

bump

Sorry I never got a notification to your earlier post.

Anyway for the video you can try to install the driver direct from ATI:

Version 12-6 or Version 12-1.

12-6 is the latest but has gave me some bluescreen of deaths so I would recommend 12-1.

For the Ethernet you should be using R230378. Run the installer and extract the files to C:\Dell\Drivers\R230378. The installer should then autorun but in the case of my XPS 8300 on Windows 7 64 bit, it didn't.

You should then go to C:\dell\drivers\R230378 (Press [Windows] and and enter C:\dell\drivers\R230378) in the box. Press OK

Double click the setup in this folder. See if that resolves your network issues. Note you should probably repeat this process for the other drivers if they haven't installed properly.

By any chance did you use the Dell Download Manager to download these files?

It sometimes causes issues. I personally don't recommend it. Please see Rick's wiki How to Bypass the Dell Download Manager.

I attempted it once, but couldn't get it to work, so I downloaded the files individually after selecting them and adding them to the download list.

So this is where I stand at the moment:

The ethernet download worked but when I attempted to install the ATI driver you suggested, I just got the blue screen you mentioned (this was the 12-1 version; I attempted the 12-6 version afterwards but kept getting an error message).

I ended up reinstalling Windows, but Windows Update keeps prompting me to install the ATI driver, which brings up the aforementioned blue screen whenever I restart.

Okay, I've since dealt with the Windows Update issue so that I'm not getting the prompts anymore.

Also, a big part of the resolution issue is that the version of Windows that I installed seems to be a 'watered down' version with some notably missing features (the dock, for example). I'm supposing it has something to do with the fact I got it off the Dell reinstallation dvd?

DellDock or DellStage? They are third party programs.

The Dell Reinstallation is identical to the Windows retail DVDs except in the way it activates.

DellDock can be downloaded form here.

DellStage can be obtained from My Dell Downloads see here.

Did you get round the Blue Screen? I notice that on my XPS 8300 I am using the 12-4 version actually.