[mmlink]

I got a new computer for christmas... it's a Dell Studio Slim 540s with Vista Home pre-installed. He had me come over to transfer all the files from his old PC - which has XP Pro. I used drivermax to export all his drivers to a flash drive. I uninstalled Vista and installed XP pro...install went fine, when it booted up I couldn't get the internet to work at all. So I tried using drivermax to install all the old vista drivers, non-of them worked, kept getting error messages, then I just tried the network ones with the same bad luck. After I restarted the machine there was a system error message saying drivers were missing or bad. I reinstalled vista home for the time being.

Can anyone offer any advice on how to get the right drivers and get this working? Are there any other programs besides drivermax that will tell you all the hardware...make and model... so maybe I can just go to their website and download them? Or maybe a fancy new tool for changing from Vista to XP?

On dell's support site for this model (Studio Slim 540s), they only have Windows Vista Drivers... I called Dell to ask them about it, they suggested not "down grading" to XP but told me some of the vista drivers for the machine would work (which I thought was odd because I tried importing them), and also said go to the Inspiron 518 drivers page and try those XP drivers.

Can anyone offer and advice or tips to help me do this?

Does anyone think this is such a horrible idea since the machine and hardware were put together for Vista and not XP? Will XP performance suffer in any way? Thanks in advance for the tips and help!

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According to Dell this model has no XP support or drivers available. You cannot use Vista drivers in an XP environment, though some pre-Vista SP1 drivers may work.

That being said, you can look the model up on Dell's website, find out the individual bits and then go off to find XP drivers. For example according to Dell this computer may come with an ATI graphics card, and ATI have XP drivers for most of their range. Intel chipset from Intel's website (and graphics if you don't have the ATI card). The sound is ALC888 which you'll probably find an XP driver from somewhere else will probably do it as it's pretty common on most boards at the moment.

[Neil Jones]

According to Dell this model has no XP support or drivers available. You cannot use Vista drivers in an XP environment, though some pre-Vista SP1 drivers may work.

That being said, you can look the model up on Dell's website, find out the individual bits and then go off to find XP drivers. For example according to Dell this computer may come with an ATI graphics card, and ATI have XP drivers for most of their range. Intel chipset from Intel's website (and graphics if you don't have the ATI card). The sound is ALC888 which you'll probably find an XP driver from somewhere else will probably do it as it's pretty common on most boards at the moment.