One soldier in the field: buying a laptop

It is often very uncomfortable to sit at a computer in one place all day . Therefore, I have been thinking about buying a laptop for a long time. And a few days ago a miracle came true - I bought a Dell Studio 1535 , such a cute dual-core laptop.

Those interested can find in the characteristics of the item "operating system", there is indicated naked DOS. It's okay, I thought, put Piggy and will work from anywhere in the house. Convenient and pleasant. Having bought a laptop, I went home and thought that the problems were over. In fact, everything was just beginning ...

The clock was about eight in the evening ... First of all, I unpacked the box and found the Bluetooth remote control inside. Agree, a pleasant surprise, even though there is little sense from it - the console turned out to be inoperative. But I learned about this a little later, but in the meantime I started installing the operating system.
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The multiboot disk with XP, which I put on my computer, before the first reboot of the machine produced a blue screen and refused to respond to my requests and threats.

You can chairs in the morning, but the money in advance

I decided to contact Dell’s support service . On their website there was no such thing as a Russian-language service, so I had to call in the USA. I was answered by a guy who, for about 15 minutes, I was trying to explain the essence of the question, but he still wanted to know the serial number of the laptop.

When I dictated it, I was told that there was an error in the code and could not help me. Another 10 minutes of useless attempts to figure out what was happening, the result was not given, and I decided to end the useless conversation.

A total of 25 minutes of empty talk, which led nowhere. But I was thanked for the call and was invited to call again. Thank you, sure.

Search yourself

Searching in Yandex, which may mean the number of errors issued, I came to the conclusion that the problem is in the hard drive, although the tests showed that the screw is working. Through numerous trial and error, it became clear that in the BIOS settings you need to change the value of “Onboard Devices> SATA Operation” from AHCI to ATA . Replaced, overloaded the machine, Windows was successfully installed.

There seemed to be little things - to put the drivers from the disk that was included. But this was not the case: the drivers turned out to be for Windows Vista only . The review of the files on the dvd with the drivers of the results did not give: everything is only under whist.

Who has good eyesight, get a cash bonus

But drivers can always be downloaded. The della site (you will be surprised) didn’t have any drivers for my laptop either, but Google gave me a link to Dave Vikman’s site, where he tried to solve the same problem. An entry in his blog was made just a few hours before my purchase, and in it he offered to download his set of drivers, assembled one by one on the websites of manufacturers of laptop components.

After just over an hour and a half, these 250 megabytes of joy were on my desktop. It all looked very impressive, considering the screen resolution of 800x600 pixels. All drivers were successfully installed, but as it turned out, for the Radeon video card, the driver had to be searched separately. The link to the driver file for the video that Wickman had suggested gave a 404 error.

Having decided to search Google for the name of this file, I got the only result - a Japanese site. There I saw the following:

い ジ ャ ッ カ ル 、 こ こ:
RadeonX3450.rar
ら 軽 快 な フ ァ イ ル

But this file was also not downloaded . I could not find the driver on the Radeon website: there was only a driver for the X3400 model, I had the X3450 in my laptop. I tried to put them, unsuccessfully.

Do it yourself

Then I decided to write a letter to Dave Vikman with a request to upload a file for my card. Half an hour later he replied and amended his post. He proposed a method for editing the drivers for the X3400, so that they would go to X3450.

It was well past midnight when I downloaded the Mobility Modder Patch program and used it to process the drivers for the video card. The archive had to be unpacked and patched files in an already unpacked folder. And in the end I installed the very patched drivers for my video card.

Total

As a result, it took me about five hours to set up a laptop. There were no casualties and destruction.

PS: I want to thank the company Dell for providing such a great quest and Dave Vikman for the help. A laptop was quite a pleasant and even with touch controls. Later, I installed Office on it, but that's another story ...