Dell M1330: best drivers?

Dear all,

I'm sitting in front of my new m1330 here in South Korea. I'd like to format HDD and get rid of Vista Home Premium and most of the Dell software. I'm not sure if I should install Win XP (64bit) or Vista Ultimate (32bit) on it in the following days.

Before I repartition and format I'd like to know if those people who have received their m1330's have had time to try different drivers? Therefore I'd like to suggest that people post on this thread their experiences with m1330 and different drivers and OS's.

ANorecticUS

EDIT: Red DE(vi)LL M1330, 2gb, 160gb, wled, nVidia 8400, n-draft, fingerprint reader, Vista Homey... for now.

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Oh, and in case someone is interested, the machine came with the latest BIOS (A02). The only problems so far are 1) occassionally CD/DVD can't be ejected as the drive itself does NOT show under "Computer!" and b) C2D whine. :-(

 

I would start with the latest Nvidia drivers.

This should help:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=64910

 

FYI I think you are the first person to receive a red machine. I was hoping to be first - mine is in transit as is one (in the UK?) for Langer.

Congratulations!

 

Let's see some pics!

 

Pictures? Aww... a bit off topic but since it's "my" thread, I'll post two. Besides I got few PMs from other members about pictures as well.

Here's M1330 on top of my already dead Acer Ferrari 3200's lid. Ace died on my hand two weeks ago and that's the reason I bought m1330 in the first place. The picture was taken with flash so the red is a bit too bright.



This one was taken without flash so the color is more like in real life. BTW, this might be a good time to mention that I'm color blind, so... don't flame me if your color is different from my pictures.




Nalada, sorry to steal your thunder. I'm sure you get yours soon. I'm surprised that people are complaining about the delivery time. I ordered mine on 23th of July and recieved the product yesterday. That's plenty fast, but I might have been really lucky!

 

can a picture be taken so we can see the whole notebook? thanks

 

Sure, but don't blame me if the pictures come out pink. To me red, pink, orange, etc reddish and greenish colors are almost the same. Like I said before, I'm colorblind. Anyway, view at your own risk.









ANorecticUS


PS. I'm still having problems with

1) DVD drive is occasionally (and at this very moment) missing![/I]
2) CPU is whining and it's driving me nuts!

 

thanks, pics came out great

 

Sorry to hear about your problems.
With regards to your post about drivers, I too am very interested in the best drivers for the laptop.
More specifically, I'm trying to figure out how to install XP on this machine. I found one other person that undertook the challenge and he indicated that he was unable to install XP as there is no "manual" eject button on the cd/dvd drive. Once put the XP disc into the drive he was unable to eject it.
I'm not sure how he finally resolved the issue but as since indicated that he went back to Vista.

There has to be a way to optimize this laptop to run with XP.

 

I have installed XP on this laptop and it is running. I am having a hard time finding drivers for it. I have the basic ones installed but dont have one for the camera, the fingerprint reader, the wireless card and a couple other unknown drivers. I think the wireless card is a matter of time but let me know if you find any info on biometric devices.

to install XP all you need is nLite, the SATA driver for the hard drive and a win XP disk. Install nLite and inject the sata driver. You will be off and runnin.

 

Try this for the fingerprint reader - http://www.upek.com/support/downloads/drivers/windows.asp

I am not using XP but this seems to be the installation with drivers for all versions of windows.

 

Any chance you would be able to elaborate on this?
I'm very close to installing XP on this computer, but have limited experience in this area.

Specifically... I found nLite, but how do I "inject" the driver? When do I use the XP install disk?
Sorry if they are dumb questions.

I suppose in the end, I am not going to attempt this until we get the wireless driver up and running.

 

That's great news! I tried with nLite as well but I kept getting errors during the install process regardless. A few quick questions.
1. Are you dual booting, or did you wipe the harddrive? I just got rid of the recovery partition and shrunk the Vista partition.
2. Did you change the hard drive settings in the bios at all? (ATA vs. AHCI)
3. Are you using the SATA drivers from the dell website?


I used this as a guide for the XP CD creation with nLite:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Install-Windows-XP-On-SATA-Without-a-Floppy-F6-47807.shtml
I burned it directly to the CD with nLite instead of creating an ISO, though.

 

Cliegal is right. I used that driver while I was installing Win Xp x64 last night. Now I need to find program that supports Win x64 to be able to use the fingerprint reader itself. More of my insallation ordeal can be found from Doubleback's " xp on 1420?" thread.

 

I got the WLAN drivers off Dell and they work OK.. a bit sluggish.

The video card procedure posted doesn't seem to have the inf file still posted.. any ideas or links? maybe I just overlooked it.