My cousin needed a new laptop for school so naturally she got a Dell, since they have a nice price-to-features ratio. One of my beefs with Dell is that they bundle a lot of crap with the default install, which I measure through the count of applications in the systray and registry (40+ combined). So in my role as the family tech support guy I re-imaged the laptop with a clean version of XP and perfectly legal software, but I had to get the drivers for the hardware, since XP doesn’t ship with them by default anymore. It’s always nice for a few months after an OS is released because you can just load the OS and voila!, all your hardware works fine. After your three month honeymoon this is no longer that case. Now Dell offers a standard format for distributing it’s drivers to the world in the form of a self extracting executable, which then calls Dell’s installer. Supposedly this installer will take care of your needs.

I downloaded and installed the file (R102320.EXE) with the drivers for the wireless card, which was a Dell Wireless 1470 (a/b/g) Dual-Band WLAN miniPCI card, which then installed itself. Afterwards the card found the SSID, including the type of security it used (WEP), but would just time out trying to connect. At first I thought maybe the sevasoft IOS on my WRT54G router, so I Googled for similar problem without any luck. Dell had several wireless cards listed for the laptop model so I tried out most of the drivers but all had the same result, if they worked at all. After putting 4+ different wireless drivers on the box, most of which had no uninstall option, I reloaded the OS and tried again with the same results. Now up to this point I had been using the Dell installer, but as a last a last ditch effort I used the Windows “New Hardware Wizard” to install the drivers, pointing to the location that Dell’s installer had extracted the files, and IT WORKED! Woo hoo!

The only conclusion I can come to is that Dell’s just assumes that their buyers will simply use the default sucky image they provide, so they didn’t actually get a chance to test out rebuilding the image to a functional OS. Maybe if they didn’t ship such a bloated OS image then that might be possible, but they do.