Dell Inspiron 1520 Brand New

Okay so I got this 1520 off of Dell Outlet for a decent price of 799...

Uhh Core 2 Duo 1.66, 1 GB 677MHz DDR2, 120 GB HD, 8600 GT, etc.. blah

Anyways it came with Vista Premium Home, well it crashed while I was installing something so I figured I would throw XP 64 Bit on it. Now this is complete hell Ive been trying for hours (dont have the time anymore to search through forums and websites hunting down info) to get this to work correctly. The wireless adapter is not showing up in device manager and no Nvidia drivers I have tried work. A lot of them come up saying they dont see the correct device for these drivers or something along those lines. Dell doesnt have the best 64 bit XP support and its really aggrivating. Should I just reinstall Vista ? And I can get Vista 64 bit, should I do that? I really want to just have decent performance for some games. I know its not a gaming beast but I just want it to run nicely, you all know what I am looking for. Sorry for the new thread, there are ALOT of these on here but I can go through them anymore I have homework to do and its 1:30 AM...

Thank ANYBODY who helps me, it means a great deal!

Jon

EDIT - My thread title sucks, its refurbished not brand new but that doesnt mean anything anyways... cheers

 

Why 64bit? You are better off with 32Bit for XP. Runing 64bit has no advantage for most games, only problems like driver issues. Try these for nVidia VGA : XP 64bit LaptopVideo2go moded nVidia drivers.

 

Why are you so stuck on 64bit everything? Try a clean install of Vista, or get regular XP. There is no need for 64bit Vista or XP and that is probably the root of most of your problems.

If I were you and did not have regular copy of Windows XP. I would try re-installing Vista 32bit from scratch. It should work pretty well.

Also look into getting 2GB of RAM if possible.

 

Thanks for the quick response. My sister took my 32 bit XP off with her to college in Michigan (I live in New York) so I didnt really have a choice. So I guess I will get that back but otherwise you think I should put 32 bit Vista back on? Is 64 bit too underdeveloped (like I should be asking this, it obviously is)? I have trouble keeping up with all of this because of school. Also, I wanted two gigs of RAM but its not necessary right now and this was cheap on dell outlet. How much would another gig cost assuming thats all I have to get. I know right now I have 2 x 512... they dont put 4 DIMMs in 1520's do they? Thanks already.

 

No they don't.
You can purchase 2GB (2x1GB) for less than $100. My suggestion is get 2GB and reinstall Vista, that is a better investment than buying XP to install with 1GB.

 

So, is Vista running games/applications decently compared to XP now? I remember when it came out it was worse off than XP. That is the MAIN reason I got rid of it (without doing research like a true smartass).