One of the first things I did with my laptop was to remove Window XP Home since it’s about as much use as a chocolate fire guard and install Beta 2 of Vista x64 (yeah I know RC2 is out but I don’t have a copy to hand). So I did a fresh install, deleting the existing drive partitions (Dell had configured the 80GB drive with two 30ish size ones?) and creating a new one that filled the drive.

The Vista installation then tried it damndest to grind the hard drive into a fine powder and also gave the DVD drive a good work out as well. It was a hideously slow process at over an hour, but I must admit it was slightly more stream lined than the XP installation process. You entered almost all the required details at the beginning and then it got on with it.

Once into Vista I had a quick poke around (Aero Glass is really nice and the new UI in general looks really cool) but was disappointed that it couldn’t find any drivers for the majority of the hardware in the machine. 

I did a bit of manual searching and found a video driver for the Intel GMA 950, but I couldn’t get a wireless driver, which was a bit of deal breaker since that’s my main network connection at home. There is a section on the Intel site for it, but it just sends you round in circles. Wireless drivers aren’t expected until 4th Quarter 2006… err?

It’s also amusing because last week Dell updated a lot of their range last week noting that machines were Vista Capable and in fact this laptop has the following sticker on it:

At the moment, it clearly isn’t. So I switched to Windows XP x64 and had similar problems with drivers. Intel did have a 64–bit graphics and wireless driver, but for things like the sound card and memory card reader I had no joy.

I also checked the Dell site for what drivers they have for the Inspiron 640m and was out of luck for anything other than Windows XP x86, which is really poor given the Core 2 is a 64–bit processor. You’d think proper drivers would be available!