Please help me fix my laptop! Reinstalling the OS & Driver questions

Please refer to the laptop specs in my sig for guidance


A while ago I was experiencing problems with Flight Simulator X. The game kept crashing and after researching the problem in the forums I was informed it was due to outdated drivers for my graphics card.

Unfortunately ATI do not offer driver updates for this particular model on their website, so the suggestion I was given was to go to a website called Driver Heaven and use their Mobility Modder tool - or something like that - to mod-update my graphics card driver.

After the mod, FSX worked fine. However, I noticed a drop in my computer's performance. Keystroke lag. Stuttering internet videos. OS slowdown and/or crashes. Etc.

At first I thought it was just me being paranoid, after essentially performing surgery on my graphics card driver(!) but over the months it's gotten worse and worse, to the point that my once super fast dual core processor laptop regularly slows to a crawl and is quite unstable.

So I recently uninstalled the mod utility program from my Control Panel and installed the latest official ATI download from Windows Update, in the hope that it would 'restore' factory settings for my graphics card driver, but to no avail. My laptop performance is still intermittently turkey and I always get a message at start-up saying "Catalyst Control Centre: Host application has stopped working"

Conclusion
Basically, I want to undo the mod and restore my laptop's performance, and to achieve this I've decided to reinstall my OS and start again. What I want to know is this. Included with my laptop were two reinstall DVD's, one for drivers, diagnostics and utilities. Will this operation restore my graphics card back to original factory settings?


Thank you for taking the time to read this. I really do appreciate any and all advice.

 

If it is the original restore DVD then yes, the original factory settings and software should be installed.

 

That's great and I'm reinstalling my OS right now, but a thought occurs.

There were two reinstall disks that came with my laptop, one for the OS, the other for drivers and utilities. And the last time I reinstalled my OS back to factory settings, I can't remember if I was ever prompted to run the driver disk or not.

If I am NOT asked to run the driver disk, given the information I provided in my OP, will the OS reinstall ALONE be enough to restore my graphics card back to factory settings, thereby erasing ALL effects of the mod I performed before, or will I need to run the driver disk as well in order to accomplish that goal?

Thanks

 

Yes , As soon you re-install ( clean install) all driver customization should go off
and if you have re-installed using the recovery DVD then i think u need to install the Drivers using the Driver DVD

 

After reinstalling your OS, you should go to the Dell website and download/install the drivers from there. That way, you get the latest drivers instead of the outdated ones on the disk: http://support.dell.com/