Planning to put Win 7 on Inspiron 9300--need latest drivers

Since I don't want to make my daily computer a guinea pig, I'm eagerly awaiting to try out the first Windows 7 public beta with my old 9300, turning it into a part-time media center. But first, I want to know:

What drivers would work with it (XP or Vista drivers)?

Are there any parts that don't have Vista drivers or up-to-date drivers that would work with 7?

Where can I find what I need in one place (or as much as possible condensed on one site)?

 

as it stands now, almost all Vista drivers will work with Windows 7.

 

Does the 9300 have Vista drivers for all its hardware? (As if anyone wanted to run Vista without a dual-core CPU--7 is a different story)

 

Have you looked at the Dell site?

 

Had Vista loaded onto a I9300 just before I got rid of it for the Studio instead.

Managed to get all the drivers for it but boy did it run like a pig under Vista...

 

You'd want to use the Vista drivers. I got it running on my desktop using the Vista drivers for a few devices. I think you might be surprised on how it runs.

 

Who had the Vista drivers--Dell or the OEMs?

 

Hey there,

Dell is the OEM. If the Dell support site doesn't have the Vista drivers, you will most likely need to hunt them down, per se!


Cin.

 

the i9300 was never sold with Vista, so there aren't any specifically for that laptop. you have to go look around the Dell site for your specific hardware on the newer i9400 or other laptops to get them. As for working with Windows 7, I'm not sure. Vista was horrible for me, so I went back to XP. Good luck!

 

I don't think you'll need to worry too much about drivers. I've tried Windows 7 6801 on a D600 and a D620 (older and newer than the 9300, respectively) and both times Windows 7 took care of almost all the drivers on its own. The only bits I had to install on my own were oddities like card readers and in those cases the stock Windows XP drivers worked just fine.

My suggestion would be to just try the install first and THEN check the device manager to see what you need in terms of drivers. You may be surprised.

 

I ran Windows 7 6801 on my old P4-m based Inspiron 8500, all the drivers came built into Windows. I did have to select the desktop ti4200 card to support my resolution. It ran decent on the system with 1.5gb of RAM, I only took it off because of the weird early version of speedstep it uses wasn't compatible (with vista either) and the CPU wouldn't clock down ... so it was loud with the fans and killed the battery life.

 

I'm trying the same thing here. There are 3 banged out drivers at the moment:

Video drivers (I have the old ATI X300 card)
Audio driver (Sigmatel C-Major audio)
and Ethernet card (either for broadcom 440x 10/100 or Intel 2200BG wireless)

XP drivers didn't work for the ethernet card, as it would hard hang Windows 7 when I try to .inf install

I will look around the net and find vista equivalent, but I haven't found the Intel drivers.

 

I found I could install drivers for a lot of my missing components using the recovery CD with the drivers and software, letting the computer search for them. The only thing giving me a problem after that was the lack of video driver fully compatible with Aero. After letting Windows Update work its magic, I got everything to work on my terms.

The only thing I'm worried about now is the stuttering, spurting, and lack of input response when I try playing video in Media Player or Media Center (although over-the-air HDTV strangely plays great). I found http://ulanoff.com/blogs/mediacenter/2009/01/13/windows-7-beta-released/, which suggested my problem was because my driver did not use WDDM code, but XDDM, compromising playback stability. Can I get WDDM drivers for the Mobility Radeon X300 card?

 

Hi, Anybody got the subwoofer working with Windows 7 or Vista?

I have just installed the XP driver for the audio but the sub doesn't work anymore and it sounds horrible now

Aside from that everything works wonderful! At least as fast as XP

 

My understanding is that Windows 7 needs Vista drivers.

 

I can't seem to get the radeon x300 drivers to work, it also doesnt help that I have to download all the drivers off the dell website, and that ATI decided to discontinue driver support on it. If anyone has info on how to get it to work, please let me know because at this point I am about ready to throw this piece of shiznit out the window..

 

Windows 7 is based on the Vista kernel. If something works on Vista, it's 99% sure to work on Windows 7. I had the beta build 7000 on my Studio 1535 for a while, and all the Vista drivers worked flawlessly.

 

That is what I used as well for my nVidia go6800 in a Dell i9300 and it worked great until some specifically for Windows 7 came out.

 

Still nobody who found a solution for the subwoofer in Win7?

 

Try installing the Vista drivers, not XP.

 

Thanks, unfortunately there are no Vista drivers for the 9300 (that I know of)