Installed Vista 64bit on Inspiron but not happy

[kill4killin]

I just installed Vista Business 64bit on my Inspiron laptop and was pretty impressed until I realized one thing...Dell does not have drivers for 64bit Vista...what the crap!

Can someone help me here? I like this a lot, I just wish I could find the drivers...the only thing that is really effected is my touch pad mouse, I can't scroll with the bar and the graphics driver isn't installed so I doubt games will run.

:cursing::cursing::cursing:

Curse you Dell

[TheAmazingDave]

Must you use the 64 bit version?

I'm surprised Dell doesn't have x64 drivers. HP had them available almost immediately after Vista launch.

[kill4killin]

From what I'm reading, they provide the drivers for the latitude and XPS machines, but they don't have them for Vostro or Inspiron. They did when Vista x64 was first released, but for some reason, and no one knows why apparently, they pulled them either late last year or very early this year. I'm on vistax64.com forums right now in their drivers section seeing if they know anything more about this but so far I haven't been able to get any good answers from any of my google searches.

To answer your first question though, I am running it because I hope to have 4GB of RAM on my laptop eventually and I'm testing it for use on my desktop to see if I like it before migrating my main rig to it. I'm really disappointed in dell right now I can't even put it in words. I tried chatting with Dell, also, only to find that my warranty had run out and I had to pay to talk to them, so I said screw that.

[dekard]

BTW, the key you used to install Vista 64b will also work for Vista 32b.

Actually, you don't need any key at all to install it. Heck, you can run for 30 days with no key. But, to activate it you must have a valid key and the same key works for 32b and 62b.

[kill4killin]

Yea, well the key and all that isn't a problem. I got the ISO and key from my school's MSDN account so I can just download the 32bit ISO but I would much rather take advantage of the 64bit OS (especially since I would have to spend the time downloading and re-installing).

[dekard]

I still haven't made the 64b switch. I tried it a couple of years back when XP 64b first came out and that was an interesting experiment. It was not ready for primetime.

[kill4killin]

It seems like it is ready now with Vista 64bit but Dell, for whatever strange reason, has pulled their drivers for it and it doesn't appear that the generic manufacturer drivers work for some strange reason either.

[dekard]

Which Inspiron do you have again?

[kill4killin]

6400/e1505

Core 2 Duo
ATI Mobility X1400
Intel wifi card

[TheAmazingDave]

Try the Canadian Dell page if it exists.

Here's why I suggest that. I have the US dv9010us. The Canadian dv9010ca comes with Bluetooth (I didn't know that at first), the dv9010us does not. I ordered the internal BT module from HP an installed it, only to find that the US driver pack doesn't include BT drivers. On a hunch, I pulled up HP Canada. Sure enough, there were several drivers that were not available on the US page.

[kill4killin]

No, they have been pulled from all inspirons unfortunately.

Well the good news is is that I got the synaptics touchpad driver to install finally, something was wrong with the first 3 installers I got from synaptics and on a whim I decided to try a last time and it worked.

I found that I have two options for the ati driver as well. It appears there are a few hacked up ones floating around so I'm going to try this one I found by recommendation from a post by someone else on driver heaven about a third party mobility Vista x64 driver and if that doesn't work, I found a way to use mobility modder.NET to mod the desktop radeon driver and mod it to work on mobility cards. The only catch with that is that if I want to use it, I have to hit F8 every time I start up the machine and turn off driver signing or whatever it's called because it's a hacked up driver...which personally for the small benefit I would get, is a bit more of a pain then it's worth TBH.

[kill4killin]

WOOT!!!

I fixed the problem!

That hacked up 7.10 Catalyst driver works just fine and now that synaptics driver installed, I have full functionality of that too. Awesome, well that was a pain in the butt, but at least it's not a total lose! Hopefully Dell will get their head screwed back on the right way one of these days and start providing the drivers again for x64.

[TheAmazingDave]

Awesome! Now enjoy. :)

[mikeb12]

that's good you gt it.

I was gonna suggest. istall everest to get all the hardware.
then go hunt them down.

I had to do that to a gateway that only had vista drivers on gateways site, wanted xp...