Reformatting My Dell

[KiLo]

So I just spent most of the day reformatting my Dell Inspiron 9400. The install process took the same amount of time it normally does. Then I came to reinstalling drivers and that is where the excrement hit the fan. Everything went well with the Dell ResourceCD then it hit a snag. My video card wasn't being recognized, (although I could still see) meaning that everything was huge because I couldn't have it in 1440X900. It took me somewhere around 3-4 hours to fix that. I finally downloaded a driver (one of about 20). Once that was working I wanted to connect to my wireless network and that was a no go. So I started searching around for drivers again. This one went a little bit faster however, only around an hour. So I finally got everything back to the way it is supposed to be.

Now the morale of the story is: Dell's ResourceCD is complete excrement! Use it to install drivers and when it intercourses up (and yes it will intercourse up) you will just have to go on a good old driver hunt until you find one that works.

[Zorchenhimer]

Reminds me of when I got my Ubuntu desktop from Dell.  Sure they gave me the drivers for my video card, but they where for Windows and not Ubuntu, the OS they installed.

[KnacK]

Kilo,

I was never  a fan on the Inspiron line from Dell.  I buy Latitudes and Optiplexes exclusively and have never had a problem wit hthe resource disc's.

Sorry that you had such trouble.

Dell's support site is pretty good, but they offer too many drivers.  What I would like t osee them do is to offer an ActiveX control that scans your pc for hardware then displays the drivers that you need.

[KiLo]

The drivers that I needed I found on Dell's support site.

As far as an ActiveX control I don't think that would have worked because I scanned my computer with tools from Intel and it didn't recognize my video card or my wireless adapter.

[KnacK]

But Dell's ActiveX control used to find the service tag on Dell pc's probe the bios for the tag.  If they can do that, they could probably also look for hardware signatures off of their mainboard.

I screwed up a latitude 820 last week that this activeX control would have saved me.

Both my boss and I have 820's.  His has an NVIDIA chip set and mine has an Intel chipset.  I had a problem with dual monitor support ( I have NO idea how he fux0rd it).  So I looked on my 820 and grabbed what I thought were his drivers.

Nope.....

I really thought I was going to have to reimage his pc to fix the issue.

Overall, I love my Dells.

On the server side of things, Dell has a great installtion utility.  You boot up with the Dell's install disk, answer a few questions ( networking, vlk, server name and a few others) then pop in the windows server install disk and you get an automated install.  Great stuff.

[jitspoe]

The moral of the story is: don't mess with reinstalling.