help with inspiron 600m

hello. not sure if I should post here or in the OS forum. I have a Instiron 600m. I received it as a gift from my ex who said if I could fix it I could have it. all it needed was 191 windows updates. once all the updates were completed the laptop ran just as good as a brand new one you would buy today. it was extreemly fast and took less than 2 minutes to do a complete startup (which is fast for me). it was running great for over a year up to this morning. we broke up on saturday, I know nobody cares, but it seems like once we were done the laptop was done also. it lost its wireless connection this morning so I restarted it for it to come back. this computer has been restarted 1000 times and fine. well this morning when I went to restart it it turned off fine and when it came back on it would not go past the windows logo. I tried safe mode and no luck. tried the repair from the windows cd and no luck. I ended up doing a clean install of windows XP and now it won't find any network drivers. wireless or Ethernet. I looked on dells support site and it had like 5 or 6 drivers for the Ethernet and over a dozen for the wireless(for my service tag). none of them will work on it now. I can't afford a new laptop right now and want to try and get this one back up and running. my old standby desktop running XP is on its last leg. any ideas? sorry for the long post

 

A clean install is essentially no different than an install from a generic Microsoft disc, and as you've discovered it does not automatically install any of the Dell-specific drivers. Too late now, but what you should have done is look in Device Manager before nuking the old installation and jotting down the descriptions of audio, video, modem and network adapters so you could sort out which devices you have from the myriad possibilities on the Dell website.

Part of what makes the Dell website so confusing is the index doesn't identify which files are the drivers and which are extraneous fluff like user guides, control panels or diagnostic utilities. You have to follow each link to find the real description of what each file consists of. For example, there are two "Broadcom 570" links, but if you click "View details" you'll find one is "Broadcom GUI Diagnostics" and the other is "User Documentation". Neither is a driver.

The 600m's built-in ethernet controller is a Broadcom 440x. Of the 440x choices on the Dell website, only R85255.EXE is a driver, so that's the one you need to install. The other 440x links are extraneous, optional crapware.

The wifi controller should be an add-in, mini-PCI card, so it could be anything. Open the door on the bottom side of the laptop and see if you can identify the make/model of the mini-PCI card. Once you identify the card, weed out the list on the Dell website and follow the "View details" links to identify which of the remaining choices is actually the driver.

Also install R58370.EXE (Intel chipset driver), R113575.EXE (video driver), R90698.EXE (audio driver), and R114084.EXE (PCMCIA slot driver). Everything else is optional, though you may want to install the touchpad driver because it gives you some useful touchpad configuration options.

 

ok thanks. the screw for the wireless cover has a stripped head so as of right now i can't get it open. will download everything to a flash drive and install on the laptop. thannks again.

 

Thanks greatly. all the drivers you said to install did and now i'm down to just two question marks on device manager. "Network Controller" and "PCI Modem". thanks again. tried to get the screw out but the head is completly rounded off.

 

FOUND THE DRIVER!! I am so glad for your help. the driver I needed was R112196.EXE I forget what the wireless card was but now I got my wireless back. now just install the modem driver so that the last question mark will go away in device manager. thanks again. any ideas on the modem driver.

 

Glad to hear that. R112196 looks like the 1370/1470 mini-PCI card, so I guess now you know what's under that rounded-off screw and no need to worry about getting it out anymore.

As for the modem, you can trial-and-error a couple and see if one of them works. IME, the most common modems were either the Conexant or Broadcom, so try R104084 or R55855. If neither of those removes the yellow alert, maybe try the PCTel driver ( R53654).