If you're talking about the ATi icon showing up in the tray:

Display Properties -> Setting tab -> Advanced button -> ATi Options and check the "Show ATI icon on taskbar" selection.  "Enable ATI taskbar icon application" should be on by default so with those two checked, the ATi icon will show up in the tray.

Hope that is what you are looking for.

Vandal

Ok, I installed the omega driver and can now change graphics settings in the game without the blue screen of death side effects. However, my screen's optimum resolution is 1400x1050 and if I try setting the resolution in the game above 1024x768, the whole game screen stretches so that the bottom and right parts are off screen. I'm guessing this has something to do with a setting that has to be manually set because I'm using the generic omega driver. I'll mess around with it later.

The easiest way to fix that is to open the Display Properties -> Settings -> Advanced -> Displays.  Click on the Panel button and uncheck the Scale image to panel size box.

Something to note here.  These drivers everyone extol are *not* optimized, tested or validated for real mobile behavior (i.e. docking, undocking, closing lid to suspend, etc.) so if you do much real mobile activity like that, you might want to be careful dropping non-Dell drivers into a Dell mobile (or non-HPaq driver into HP mobile, etc.).  I take full advantage of these features at home and at work so it was important to me that power management and docking/undocking behave properly.  If these things are not important to you, ignore this reply.

I have an Inspiron 8600 with Mobile Radeon 9600.  I used the Dell driver that corresponds to 7.93 in ATi build lingo (Catalyst now at ~7.99).  Out of curiosity, I downloaded and installed the latest driver from Omegacorner.com this week.  Within 24 hours I had a blue screen, two lockups and once the driver unloaded for some reason upon resume.  Again, this related to things like undocking and standby closing the lid/resume opening the lid (normal for a *real* notebook user :-).  Needless to say, Omegacorner.com driver is out and Dell driver is back in.

So caveat emptor for drivers that haven't been checked out and posted by Dell.  They lag the Catalyst drivers and Omegacorner drivers, but IMHO, Dell knows its notebooks and trades off latest-greatest for stability for its mobile users.  What is posted on support.dell.com may not play Halo as well as other people's drivers, but they are tested and verified (friend on the "inside") to ensure normal mobile behavior works properly.

Please don't misunderstand me about the Omegacorner.com drivers (and others).  They are probably fabulous drivers for gamers and those who don't really do a lot of mobile computing.  It's great that folks have a passion for pushing the envelope.  The problem with doing drviers for mobile systems, whether Dell, HPaq, IBM, Toshiba, etc. is that MS wrote their OS's for desktop systems and kind of added some mobile stuff as an afterthought.  So Dell, HP, etc. had to come up with ways to make these things work thru BIOS, special driver tweaks with ATi, nVIDIA, etc.

As a result, unless someone from Omegacorner.com has the equip't, time and interest to check and fix these kind of behaviors (even they claim to not be driver developers, just driver packagers), they won't be validated or worse, crash as in my case.  Dell has the equip't and commitment to put out stable drivers even if they aren't latest-greatest.

Just my $0.02

Vandal

With the huge load of new, higher priority XPS customers I sincerely doubt Dell would invest time to renew old drivers for better performance.

IT was hardly a year after I bought my laptop that they stopped making new drivers altogether for my ati m9.

I agree that if you want rock stable stability and actually use the dell disk that reformats your computer to dell preconfigurations, that you go with the dell drivers.  Glitches come now and again, however i can count the number of blue screens on one hand post omega/modded catalyst drivers. 

Then again I take time to customize every nook and cranny of my notebook to make sure blue screens ARE a rarity.

I am thankful I am not stuck with the same 2 year old drivers, when a desktop user has updated his/her 2 year old video card at least 8 times.

And a last note I have yet to see a suspend to disk feature I find I can *totally* rely on.

The dell 8200 was never meant to be a true lightweight because of its structure and weight, but a desktop contender.  I desire drivers that update similar to a desktop as well.