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Never have done this before, just wanted to make sure I'm heading in the right direction on this:
1. Hard Drive crashed on laptop (ran diagnostics = failed)
2. Going to buy new hard drive for laptop
3. No recovery CD
4. Will buy a copy of XP from Tigerdirect
5. Install OS and download drivers from DELL
Go to a different PC And download the Dell NIC drivers before you install XP. That way if XP doesn't have a built-in driver that will work with it you have it on hand. That will let you download the rest of the drivers easily.
Instead of ordering XP from a 3rd party, just order a replacement from Dell. It'll probably be cheaper, and it'll have all of the drivers preinstalled.
Go to a different PC And download the Dell NIC drivers before you install XP. That way if XP doesn't have a built-in driver that will work with it you have it on hand. That will let you download the rest of the drivers easily.
I can almost guarantee that this is correct. You might also want to download the video driver and the sound card driver. I have done this many many times on Dell Optiplex, Dimension, Latitude and Inspiron computers and always find I need these drivers. Sometimes other drivers are needed as well. I've seen USB fail to work until drivers from the Dell Resource CD were installed, and one Latitude failed to find a driver for the wireless adapter without the Resource CD.
Remember to do this on another PC and put the drivers on a CD. Until the NIC driver is installed, you can't get in the Internet to download anything.
Thanks for all your assistance. I'm definitely going to go the route of downloading the drivers (video, NIC, usb, etc.) to my desktop before I reinstall XP on the laptop.
If you know someone else that has a Dell XP recovery CD, you can make a copy of that CD and use it to install XP on the new drive in your Dell, as long as it's the same version your licensed for (Home or Pro), total OS cost $0, and it's perfectly legal.
If you know someone else that has a Dell XP recovery CD, you can make a copy of that CD and use it to install XP on the new drive in your Dell, as long as it's the same version your licensed for (Home or Pro), total OS cost $0, and it's perfectly legal.
Gee Dave thanks for the info. I'm all about saving some dough in this economic climate.
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