Why does Dell hate people who want to update their drivers?

I have been fighting with my laptop for the past several hours (probably 4 or so) to get new drivers installed.

Is it just me, or does Dell absofrackinlutely hate people trying to update the video drivers? Even trying Mobility Modded drivers I get the error "application install install package failure!" and the install rolls back. I FINALLY got the DNA-ATI Vista Win7 9.5's installed, hopefully this will help the (what I think is) sluggish performance.

Does anybody have a BIOS dump tool for this thing? I want to dump and edit the BIOS of the GPU so I can set the clocks to the correct ones.

Dell sure don't make life easy.

 

Doesn't mean it's Dell's fault.

 

wait, youve got windows 7 & are trying to update drivers & are complaining that it doesnt work? dude.

 

Dell isn't officially supporting windows 7 yet. If you want to get the latest windows 7 driver, do the following (should work)

1. Download CCleaner @ www.ccleaner.com
2. Download the desired driver for your laptop at your local driver's site (www.nvidia.com or www.ati.com)
3. Make sure that it's the right architecture for your system (x86 is 32 bit and x64 is 64-bit)
4. Uninstall the old driver
5. Restart
6. Install, and then run CCleaner, with it set to clean out registry entries and temp files (you'll have to tell it to clean out one clean at a time... first temp files, then registry
7. Install the driiver you chose based on your card and OS and bit architecture
8. Restart again
9. Run CCleaner to ensure that temp files and leftover registry entries are gone for good
10. Game as usual!

This is what I do for my nvidia drivers, and I've never had a problem with it. Give it a shot. Dell doesn't hate you, they just don't support an OS until it's officially out, and CSRs via chat / phone won't help primarily because they've been instructed not to until an OS goes gold. They'll tell you it's software upgrades and to do it at your own risk and that the warranty and support won't help you.

If you have further inquiries, feel free to ask

Jason

 

Dell doesn't hate anyone..they just recently started adding the Windows 7 Upgrade Option on the lappys Once, it's fully supported by Dell..you shouldn't have any prob's....*patience*

Linky: http://www.dell.com/windows7

Use, Jason's suggestion below..it should work

Cin

 

ATIs drivers never installed correctly on Vista, either. I had a discussion with a team member of the Catalyst driver team and he stated that Dell requests ATI keep their drivers from installing on Dell's laptops, for some odd reason. He never got back to me when I asked WHY Dell wants ATI to do this.

 

I had a while back, a Dell XPS GEN I laptop (ati mr9800, 3.4ghz P4 northwood, 2gb ddr 400 RAM, 80gb HDD) and I would always have the problem you described... you couldn't put normal ATI drivers onto it. I had to use these special "tweaked drivers" (think what DOX's are now, but 4 years ago and for ATi cards) and they had no warranty of working, were completely "at your own risk", and when they didn't work, you got a BSoD, when they did work, you could get an extra 3 to 4 fps in games such as NFS:MW. The scary part was at that time, (late 2004 to early 2007) the concept of a "gaming laptop" as we know it now was merely a novelty. SLi was a dream, overclocking was done solely through the BIOS in fixed increments, and the idea of having more than 64MB VRAM in a laptop was considered ridiculous. Many companies thought it would be a niche / passing fad, and thus kept "barebones" accounts of drivers, or worse made proprietary drivers that only worked on THAT particular machine.

As far as DELL / ATi and why normal ATi won't work, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if DELL compelled some modifications into the ATi card to make it "their own special edition". It's well documented that DELL does such things, be it to "proprietize" something, or to make it idiot-proof.

(2 Cases in point: The MR9800, many early ones could be "jump-soldered" to become an x800 with more shaders and pixel cores, increasing its performance by approximately 30%... DELL ultimately had ATi revise its cards so that any soldering of this type would result in a voided warranty and a dead card. On top of this, just to get the MR9800 was a $400 + labor upgrade from the MR9700 line. (I know, i paid the piper and had it installed... took HOURS of prodding dell and an unbelievable amount of showing evidence the upgrade actually existed before they went along and did it.)

Second case-in-point: A nVidia GeForce Go 7950GTX is stock-clocked at 575 MHz core / 700MHz memory. DELL, due to the design of the XPS m1710, felt that because of its modular design (m1710 / m90 / e1705, and later the m6300 all share the same designs, but have exclusive BIOS and mobos to differing extents), and the fact that gamers like to OC everything (and that could destroy DELL's XPS profit margin with oodles of dead from OC'ing cards)... decided to completely lock the BIOS of the card, and force it to underclock to 575MHz core / 600MHz memory. The only workaround was a hacked bios that you had to know which card you were working on, and which BIOS to use (locked, unlocked, rev0, rev1, etc.)

DELL I think likes to have a sense of ownership over not only whatever ODM notebook they choose to stamp their nomenclatures on, but also what the end-user can put into the notebook. They also like to keep things in lockdown / prevent outside parties (even when the outside party is the company that designed the good!) from getting in to keep consumers tied to their "phone support / online support" programs, and being able to justify a driver as software, thus you get charged for it through dell's "pay here for software problems" service (that any good forum can provide an answer for for free). Think about it this way, you have 1 million users of x product. You make $30 / hr per person when they call your company and need help installing a driver, the average person needs 2.5 hrs. On avg, each call generates $75. Multiply that by 1 million, that's $75 million GROSS in free revenue generated by simply keeping customers tied to your company for ANY software need, be it MS office, or driver installations. If everything wasn't proprietary, and you could Download the product free from the driver's site, then the company's R&D in individualizing the product wouldn't get compensated, and it'd become a loss of incentive to develop such an animal.

Remember, DELL isn't a small company, and their bottom line lies about 80% in "what are your financial inflow figures" and 20% "giving the customer a facade of being satisfied". DELL also knows if you butter up the average computer user enough, you can get them to buy pretty much whatever you want them to buy, as most upgrades are about 90% profit. follow what I posted, and see what happens. Odds are it could be something as simple as not properly erasing the old driver... but if not, you may have to just stick with DELL's cruddy drivers until the DELL is relegated to a different status.

Jason

 

A query to the OP. Was it DNA-ATI Vista Win7 9.5 or DNA-ATI Vista Win7 9.4? I cannot find the DNA-ATI Vista Win7 9.5 listed on http://www.donotargue.com/list.php?c=dnaati

 

Sorry, it's the 9.5 betas.

http://www.donotargue.com/forums.php?m=posts&q=672


I ultimately rolled back to a system restore point before I started messing with everything, because those drivers disable Aero and give me a rolling TDR ending in a BSOD with Fallout3.

Never had this sort of problems with my I6000d, which is why I went with Dell again in the first place.

I've since learned my lesson. Next laptop will be a whitebook.

 

It's a beta... it could be an inherent bug in the driver.