My driver recommendation for 8600 for Vista32

Hey there,

I fiddled hours and days to get my old Inspiron 8600 working fine under Windows Vista. Driver support in Vista really sucks, it fools you by letting you think everything is working fine, but when you for example want to use another bluetooth profile (mine is a TrueMobeil 300) you end up in a driver hell, Windows will try to install drivers on every startup.

My system:
- Inspiron 8600 with 1gb RAM (to be updated to 2gb soon)
- Seagate 100GB HDD, 7200 rpm
- Atheros 5005 WLAN Adapter (BCM WLan that comes with 8600 sucks for Linux, this 20€ investment was well worth it)
- NVIDIA go5650, 128MB
- 1920x1200 TFT

I keep it short:
- NVIDIA driver version 98.13 from laptopvideo2go.com (you must use the device manager with manual device selection and have disk method). If you prefer a noob-safe installation and don't need external monitor support, 96.85 will be fine too. See community led driver recommendation discussion in laptopvideo2go for my further reasons, I really tried a bunch of drivers. Save your time

- I finally found some Toshiba drivers that work for the Dell Truemobile 300 internal bluetooth - I mean ALL profiles (plain device connection works ok out of the box, but once you try to use any other profile a lot of devices will be found and there is no driver near or far available that works from Dell. You need a recent BTM200 chip driver, the one I found from Toshiba works fine)
Get it here:
http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/downloads/driver_bluetooth_25503A.exe

- Vista lets my CPU fan run much more often than under Windows XP. I found it very annoying after some time. I use I8kfangui to control the fans and set the fan to kick in "slow" at 70°C (when there it will cool down with low noise to 55°C in ~ 20 seconds), "fast" at 75°C.
I looked up carefully and found the CPU specs for Centrino CPUs at Intels web site. The processor is specified for a maximum of 100°C. So this should be safe, but be aware that high heat may decrease your CPUs lifetime. But I for one don't care much about it anymore, it's rather harmless for this CPUs spec - and once my notebook bites the dust I have will have to replace it with a new one anyways.
Get it here:
http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html


My last investment for this notebook will be the 2gb RAMs for 120€. The 7k HDD really made a difference when I bought it last year. So performance-wise I'd say my say if you still own a 8600 and think about replacing it - and you are using it for work (no gaming) - think about it again. Invest about 250€ for a fast 7k rpm HDD and 2gb ram and skip one notebook generation. It's still a solid and fast working machine (I use my system for programming, Linux, office tasks).

I think the 7k HDD, 2GB RAM keep me up to date for another 1-2 years.
Replacement planned end 2008/mid 2009 and the conditions for a replacement machine will be:
- LED Backlit
- LONG battery life (my Dell offered ~7h with second battery in the cd bay in their best days, most recent Santa Rosa systems suck)
- Silent
- At least 2,5GHz mobile Dual Core CPU that really makes a difference (~ 3-4 times faster than my 2GHz single core) and worth the investment for the next ~ 4 years

Cheers and happy new year!