Bought a laptop, now what?

I just ordered the e1505 from dell, and would like to optimize performance on it.

by reading the forums, its quite obvious that i would need a reformat, but is this a good idea? Ive heard way too many horror stories about the issues after reinstalling windows.

some people are missing drivers, "features" start malfunctioning, etc.

I understand that dell will ship with a "drivers" disc. but the drivers may not be the latest ones. Im just too confused about the many different typese of drivers. Just off the top of my head, i remember something called an "omega" driver.

Are there huge differences with the different drivers? Which ones would be the most efficient?

Also, what is "BIOS" and "BIOS Flashing"?

Anyways, if it helps, my laptop will have the following specs.

 

Congratulations on your new laptop. I got the same laptop with pretty similar specs a few weeks ago and I love it!

Really the whole driver thing is not as big of a deal as some people make it out to be. Yes, the Drivers CD shipped with your computer will be out of date, and as of a few weeks ago, the e1505 still was not included on it. If you visit the Dell site, there will be a drivers and downloads section for your specific laptop, and all the drivers you will need will be right there. The only choices you'll have to make are what network card driver to choose (you'll need the "Intel Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection" one) and what graphics card driver to choose (looks like the x1400 one for you). Everything else, just download them all (you probably won't need to download any Display Drivers - those are for Dell external LCDs only - or Removable Media Device Drivers - those are only if you purchased a USB flash drive from Dell). Once you have everything (make sure to keep track of all the random numbers in some way, so you know what driver is what) burn it all to a CD or put it on a flash drive, and then reformat. SouthernGirl has a great guide to help out with this - it's a sticky at the top of this forum.

For what it's worth, I reformatted, repartitioned a little bit to get rid of Dell's restore partition, and reinstalled XP Pro with no problems whatsoever. I even immediately got Media Direct working again using Dell's MD Restore CD you can download off of their site. I did have to email them and ask for a few more software CDs to get back a few of the programs they pre-installed.

The Omega drivers are for your graphics card. So far, I haven't tried them out, but they supposedly will up your graphics performance a little bit. I'm fine right now with the Dell drivers, but I'll probably explore the Omega ones a little later. If the Dell ones work for you, don't worry about those for now.

The BIOS is the Basic Input/Output System of your notebook - it will check to make sure your hardware is working and then initiate the boot sequence of your computer, among other things. "Flashing the BIOS" is something you can do if there are certain problems with your system, or if there's an upgrade available. My computer shipped with BIOS version A03, and version A04 was available before I received it, so I flashed it to upgrade it. Dell makes it very easy to do - one of the drivers on that link above will flash it and upgrade it for you.

 

Might want to look at this.

 

So let's see if I did this right, I downloaded all the drivers in every category except for the Bios, Diagnostics(since it's on a partition) and the display(because I don't have an external monitor) Can I run them from my flash drive? Will it mess it up if I cjange the file names so that I know what each one is?

Could you also correct me if I'm wrong in any of my assumptions.

Note I also downloaded the mediadirect repair utility and this is all for my E1405 that hasn't arrived yet.

Nevermind the changing filename Q, you can see what it is by double clicking on it.

I didn't download the BIOS driver since it didn't seem to be an update, just the original that's already on the system(correct me if I'm wrong)

 

You can put them on your flash drive and then just copy them over to the hard drive of the computer when you're ready to use them. I would guess you could run them right off the flash drive though - the first thing the programs do is copy themselves into the c:\dell\drivers directory.

For the BIOS update, you can compare the versions when you get the system. There's really no significant reason to update if you have no problems with the current BIOS, but it can't hurt anything.

Oh, and I'm not sure what you meant by downloading all the drivers in all the categories. That won't be quite necessary. Looking at the e1405 downloads, it looks like you'll only need one of the wireless card drivers (two if you ordered bluetooth).

 

I know, I downloaded the following

Dell Quickset
MD repair
Intel Chipset
Ricoh driver
Notebook system software
Sigmatel Audio driver
Synaptics Touchpad driver
Intel 945GM driver(video card)
Intel Pro Wireless 3945 a/b/g driver

is that everything?

 

Looks pretty good to me - I'd have to compare with Dell's list to be sure. When you're done re-installing all of those, you can check the device manager and see if any of the devices have a yellow exclamation point by them. Those would be the ones that you missed if there are any.

 

the only thing not listed was a communication driver, which was listed for the other systems I looked at while getting a general idea of what I'm supposed to download.

 

Yeah, I remember I didn't install the communication driver originally (modem), and Windows kept popping up some kind of "useful" bubble about needing that driver.