reinstalled OS in my Inspiron 8600

I've had this machine for quite awhile. It came with XP Pro, the original version. I had upgraded it to SP2 but could not get it to upgrade to SP3. I'm not using the machine anymore so I thought I would upgrade it to a clean install of XP SP3 while I could still get it from MS, and then pass the machine on to a family member. Apparently this machine is old enough that it does not have the recovery OS on the hard drive. I had a full install disk for XP SP3 so I decided I would try installing from that.

I installed the OS, formatting the hard drive the slow way in the process (of course I used the serial number that belongs to the Inspiron's OS license). Surprisingly to me, Windows did not install any drivers for the network card so I couldn't immediately connect to the net. I went to Dell's site and downloaded the network card drivers onto a flash drive, then installed them to the Inspiron that way. I was able to get onto the net, and I downloaded a few other drivers from Dell's site too.

I then went through the full update path of downloading the windows updater and the windows authentication software. Then I turned on automatic updates and forced it to download the most important updates. It found 84 and downloaded them.

I couldn't figure out what video was in the Inspiron, but I was pretty sure I had read that it was some form of integrated graphics. Well included in the 84 updates was a driver for the integrated graphics processor.

This process took about 3 hours total. For about half of this time I could let the machine run and do something else, so I didn't have to babysit it the whole time.