N00b Here; Questions About New XPS 15

Glad I found this forum. It's a wealth of info and assistance. Right now, I need some of both.
Purchased my first laptop, the Dell XPS 15. It's a beaut, and the reviews confirm what a good product it is. It is configured as such:

i5 -460M 2.53GHz
6GB's Memory
Backlit keyboard
NVIDIA GeForce GT 420M
Intel Centrino Advanced -N 6200
92 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion

As we all know, every manufacturer loads their machines with bloat and BS. I prefer to run my rig with a light load. So the first thing I did was wipe the hard drive and do a clean install of Windows 7 Pro. Simple enough. The problem I'm having starts now, with driver installation.
If I understand correctly, the first thing I need to do is install Dell's System Software utility. Done, no problem.
But now I want to install the various drivers: chipset, video, NIC, audio, etc. Problem is, when I go to the Drivers and Downloads page there are numerous drivers offered for download. Even when I type in my specific Service Tag number, the choices aren't narrowed down.
For example, under Communications driver I see 7 choices Which is the one for me? When I contacted Dell Support via their Chat service, the Agent was as confused as me
When I go into the Device Manager now, I see yellow exclamation marks next to a number of items: Ethernet Controller, USB Controller, Unknown device, and a few others.
Can anyone help?
Thank you!

 

On the Dell site, it is sort of noob-proof. If you download the wrong driver or inappropriate software, it just won't install.

(You just get some error message like "Laser-tag Ultimate Module not found" or somesuch.)

So, if you don't want to bother finding out what components are actually on your laptop, just put in your service tag, and make your best guess.

 

It isn't that I "don't want to bother finding out what components are actually on my laptop". I just don't know how to do it. That's why I'm asking for assistance.

 

I didn't mean to sound snide. What I mean is it is safe to use your service tag and download and try to install everything Dell has to offer. If it's a driver for some component not on your system or some other irrelevant software, it just won't install (or if some irrelevant driver manages to install itself, it doesn't really matter)

Meanwhile, to find out what's on your laptop, I like System Information for Windows. SIW | System Information for Windows by Gabriel Topala

Or, Belarc Advisor. Belarc Advisor - Free Personal PC Audit

Some responses in this thread may help. http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...-xps15-clean-install-whats-worth-keeping.html

But, I'm noobish myself, so take this for what it's worth...

 

Thanks! I appreciate the reply and links.
I want to question one thing you wrote. You said it doesn't matter if the wrong driver is installed. I'm thinking it can't be good for the computer to have drivers installed for non-existent components. It must cause conflicts or some chaos, no?

 

I edited my response to make it a bit clearer.

My belief: If you install a driver for a component that is not actually on your system, it is no problem at all (except for the 67kb of wasted space), because that driver only comes into play when you activate that component (but you don't HAVE that component, so it is never active, so who cares?).

If you install an outdated driver for a component that IS on your system, that's not so good.

But, DELL is sorta famous for forcing your to use official DELL drivers (instead of the latest NVIDEA drivers for example - this drives a lot of people here nuts), so you can't go too wrong just trying everything at the DELL site with your service tag.

You may still get a few yellow question marks in the device manager, because the DELL site doesn't have everything.

 

Your laptop right now comes standard with thousands of drivers for non-existent components. They're there for just in case you may someday install that component, but they remain dormant until then.

 

BTW, Dell just released an updated driver for the nVIDIA GeForce GT 420M, yesterday. Oddly, whenever I try to download it,it doesn't download and I get an error message. Anyone else notice this?

 

Yep. 150.5 MB file. Says "session data is corrupt".

 

They worked for me yesterday. NVidia also released beta drivers on the nvidia site that require no modifications to install. I think two of the unknowns are the Ricoh Media Card Reader and the Freefall sensor. I'm sure that I didn't need to go outside of the Dell drivers to get rid of an unknown. I know I read the recommended steps after installing the OS were the following:

1. Install Dell System Software
2. Install Chipset Drivers
3. Install Integrated Graphics Drivers (i3 and i5 CPUs only)
4. Install dedicated Nvidia Drivers