New 1520, some questions

Hello!

First of all I'd like to thank everyone who contributes on this forum, which was acually one of the deciding factors in buying a dell for me. Without you most of my questions prior to buying my unit wouldn't have been answered as in detail as they were here.

Anyway onto the question: I just got a dell inspiron 1520 and am not as computer savvy as most of you are so I thought I'd ask a few questions. First off are there any drivers I should download to speed up my system? Notebook specs are as follows.(atleast what I think might need drivers, help me out if theres anymore)-
Intel Core 2 Duo T7500, 2.2GHz
256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
160G 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
Windows XP (unless I should keep vista on it, but I've read its a memory hog and I'd like to play games fairly well)
It also comes with bluetooth so if that conflicts with anything please tell me
I'm also interested in OC my graphics card so I can play games such as COD4 a little smoother. I know theres alot of topics on this forum how to do so but If you dont mind leaving a little more information here I'd be more than greatfull. If you need anymore information on the system itself go ahead and ask I'll probably be refreshing the page every few minutes
Thanks again

 

I am using the newest dell driver which is working just fine , oh and get the ati tool for ur videocard , it kicks ass.

 

Thanks for the quick response, is the ATI tool something I can just google and download or somewhere on laptop2video.com (or whatever the site thats tossed around on here alot)

 

On a side note, you should stick with vista. It has only a very small impact on gaming especially if you have 2GB of RAM. If you use Flamenko's Vista Tweak Guide, you can tweak Vista to be just as fast as XP.

 

I disagree , look at my sig and u will understand.

*edit* dont know about that guide though , but a usually its xp > vista

 

I agree that XP does (in almost all situations) perform better than vista, but that gap is slowly closing, and it isn't that large anymore. IMO, I would (and do) use vista, as it does have benefits over XP. But, in the end, it's a personal choice.