Inspiron l8000 XP Pro Drivers??

Hello to All,
I have searched this forum for half an hour and found no hits on upgrading an ancient PentIII with 10GB hard drive with 256M of ram to XP PRO.

The Dell support drivers page only covers Windows 2000 drivers and older, nothing about XP for Inspiron l8000 which came with Millenium.

I know most are not interested in a laptop this old.
I am upgrading this for someone without much money to spend in this area of her life and just watches movies and checks email. So this would be fine.

Any ideas from you guys/gals that have done this before on XP drivers?

Thanks for your help,
Chetanji.

 

If the machine is old enough to have shipped with XP, chances are that XP will include all the drivers you need by default. I've installed XP on Dell Latitudes that shipped with 98 and 2000 and the installations have all gone through without the need for extra drivers.

If there is somehow a piece of hardware that DOES need a special XP driver (usual culprits from my experience are GPUs and networking devices), you can probably find something on Google.

 

Thanks for your reply,
This machine shipped with Windows ME.

XP Pro SP2 has just been installed and the Toshiba DVD-ROM SD C2502 doesn't read data disks, i.e. can't boot from CD/DVD.

Also, every boot shows a fuzzy TFT display. I have to close the lid, then open it and press the on/off button and it comes back correctly. It appears the backlight is turning on slowly??

It only has 256MB Physical Memory and 10GB hard drive.
It has a floppy drive installed too.

I am trying to find a 3 1/2 floppy in order to flash the Toshiba drive as the firmware from a newer Inspiron model with this same Toshiba drive should work fine. I can not flash the Toshiba from the CD/DVD as it will not read the disc.

Thanks,
Chetanji

 

I understand money isn't readily available for this laptop but it seems so outdated that XP will more than likely have problems running on it. Granted ME was the worst thing Microsoft ever did imo. At the very least the laptop needs a memory upgrade to a minimum 512MB to start to run XP. Also the partition XP requires when loading will take a considerable amount of your HDD up. I'm not sure if the laptop will run XP or not, I guess it would be something if I had it here I could mess with it more, but it seems like it would be more frustrating than it is worth. Your friend could look at a new laptop, one for $300 or so that will do what she needs. We have several old P3 laptops here at work but all we have ran on them is 2000 at the latest. We actually just got rid of most of them for newer laptops that will run XP after we upgraded our server to 2003. If you do want to press on with the install I recommend contacting Dell if you can't find drivers for it on their site. They may be able to help you with this or their are many sites that have drivers/links to drivers for laptops on google, just do a search for laptop drivers. Good luck with whatever you decide and I hope it turns out well for you. Also was just thinking, instead of loading XP on the machine, I am sure it would run Win98SE just fine which imo was one of the most stable versions of Windows that has been around. That fuzzy problem with the screen also could be a display driver/video driver you need to download. The drive quit working after you got XP 100% installed or you are still trying to install XP?

 

Thanks for your nice reply...
I received the problem with XP PRO already upgraded by a friend. The hard drive was almost full and horribly fragmented from years of use and no maintenance.

After defragging several times with a quality product (jkdefrag) and removing unneeded program occupying too much space, the old gal has 25% free space and a CD/DVD ROM that can only read a VCD that plays in WinDVD. No data disks or other types.

I did just finish flashing the CD/DVD ROM and it took. However on next boot I still had the problem of "Drive not ready" when using dos window and typing D: "for the correct drive letter for CD/DVD ROM".
I then get the error "drive not ready."

Thanks for the idea of Win 2000 install except it can't read the CD/DVD ROM drive.
I have an USB CD/DVD ROM drive and perhaps it will work, although the BIOS may not support this choice.

I have noticed that at my work some of the programmers still run 2000 and the rest of us run XP PRO SP3.

It is difficult to find old memory in India. I noticed it is cheaper to buy new 667 Mhz memory as slower 333 costs almost twice the price.
Must be supply and demand basic level here.

I am an American living in India working at one of the top ten hospitals in this amazing nation of over 1 billion souls.

To upgrade the I8000 Inspiron to 512 would make an enormous difference.
Right now to get the CD/DVD ROM drive to read is my concern and is becoming more and more difficult.
I googled for a day or so and only found the update from Dell for Toshiba SD C2502. The device manager sees it as device id23 and all drivers appear fine.
Toshiba's site offers no help.
I have found though if you percevere you will find your answer online, usually from a blog where someone else had the same problem.
Thanks for your creative message!
I will check the Dell site for another video driver.
Chetanji