up to my bushy eyebrows in xps m1530 problems

Folks,

my Vista to XP conversion has been a bit of a flop -- Machine just hasn't been stable enough. I've had blue screens and stop errors from the audio driver, from AVG anti virus, from the dell wifi driver. I've done a memtest on it, I've done a windows RAM test, and a WD hard drive test and all of those results are fine. I've learned a lot about diagnosing blue screens in this process, but my computer just doesn't seem 'right'. it seems every three days there's a blue screen on boot and a new item from Dr. Watson that I need to diagnose and debug. This is a refurbed XPS m1530 - is there some hardware that is wonky that perhaps I'm overlooking? I followed the instructions on the XP upgrade here and had no problems, even made the slipstream install disk, which went fine. Had a bit of issues when I realized the Intel wifi driver wasn't the right one, but that was the only hang up during install.

I guess I'm wondering if anyone has any insight as to what's happening here? Should I try a wipe and reinstall of XP? also I'm tempted to try to get the machine back to 'factory state' but have no idea how to install media direct then vista. is there a walkthrough somewhere on how to 'restore' it?

Thanks!

 

Hey man, im sorry about your trouble, but the xps m1530 was never designed for windows xp, thats why its so troublesome to get it to work, i dont think its a hardware problem, its more of a side-effect, i think you should re-install XP if you feel like xp is the one you want, but the smarter choice would be to keep with vista, or even try out the new windows 7 ( which is a blast!!! i love the thing, its so much more stable than any other crud OS by Windows )

"factory default" is never a good option, you can always skip the media direct, and format your HD completely in the vista intaller, that way, you will have a "clean" installation.

of course, if you have the 32bit version of vista you can always put in the media direct CD, and it will install itself, and then the vista CD, but be careful not to format the media direct partition ( media direct wont work with vista 64 bit )

Once the BSODs start happening the best thing is definitely to re-install windows

 

is there any reason why u are usin XP? vista, post sp1, is much more stable than XP. if stable performance is what u'r lookin for, then i'd stick with vista.

p.s. - are u rock lee? if u are can i have yur autograph?

 

just like you i am running windows XP on my XPS M1530 and i have blue screens every 3-4-5 days. don't know what is the problem. but im thinking it is the wireless driver.

there is a function in the run menu called driver verifier (run>verifier) but i am not sure how to use it to check if the exact driver is making trouble.

 

I'm still erroring out ever couple of days too... the driver debug tool has been pointing to a lot of different things. today's was the audio driver again. I just downloaded memtest and I'm testing the RAM, but after 2 hours it's found no problems. anyone else getting blue screens on this machine with XP?

 

The Dell Media Direct and Vista clean install guide can be found here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=157838

A nice pictorial of the process is here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=3314842&postcount=1291

Used it for a Media Direct / Clean Vista reinstall for my M1330. Great guide.

Not sure about a full 'factory restore' if you've wiped out your restore partition. I'd just do the clean install listed above. You get a nice, bloatware free, install of Vista.

Take it from an XP recidivist. Until I picked up my M1330 refurb a month or so back, I was very Anti-vista (due to early experiences, pre-SP1). Now I am quite liking it on my laptops.