Vostro 1320 Reformat Issue?

I recently received my new Vostro 1320 and i'm quite satisfied with the system thus far. I would however really like to put my own copy of XP on it (the system came with Vista Basic). I have my own copy of XP and all the XP drivers from dell's support site. I've heard that there might be some issues regarding the BIOS that might make the reformat less than simple. Can anyone provide any advice about it or should I go about it as usual. Thanks alot for your help !

 

Hmm i dont really know much about mobile motherboards. But usually when you reformat you want to download the correct drivers for the motherboard so the lan/wpa graphics card etc all work right. I would have to say the best suggestion is to call dell themselves and ask them to ship you a reformat cd or a utility cd with all the correct drivers.

in the past my brothers old dell laptop had all the utilities and what none included in the shipment. Which when i also received my 1320 i was disappointed to see non instruct manuals or anything quite disappointing.

 

Other than having all of the required drivers for XP, the only XP-related issue that I could come up with for the 1320 would be related to the use of AHCI. You can use it in XP, however, if you plan to use that BIOS setting, I'd suggest you read one of the 'how to' guides in getting it setup for XP. It pretty easy to load during the Vista install, but XP (at least from the guides I've skimmed) seems to be a bit harder to get it loaded and working in.

Regardless, you don't need to use the AHCI as enabled, you can use the normal IDE BIOS setting without issue. (I noted that my 1720 still has that setting as an option, so I am assuming that the 1320 has it as well).