Migrating the Dell Inspiron 1721 From Vista to Windows XP

It seems that Schrock Innovations is developing quite the reputation across the country for doing the impossible – we have forced another big-box brand notebook computer to run XP withouit the help or support of the manufacturer.

This time it was a Dell Inspiron 1721 from Louisiana. OUr customer shipped their notebook all the way to Nebraska to have Vista removed and Windows XP installed in its place. Dell’s website does not provide ANY XP drivers for the notebook and their online support chat sessions go quiet with the mention of the dreaded XP.

If you are in the same boat and need your Dell Inspiron 1721 and want to run Windows Vista instead of Windows XP, here are some of the drivers you will need to get the job done:

**Note** You do not need SATA drivers to install XP on this model. You need to adjust the BIOS to use ATA instead of SATA and no drivers are required.

Video Driver: http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx

Network Driver: http://www.downloadsource.net/d17370/Dell-Broadcom-440x-10-100-Integrated-Controller-Driver-Windows-2000-XP-DOS/

Audio Driver: http://support.us.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R158235&formatcnt=1&libid=0&fileid=211297

SM Host Driver: http://ati.com

Multimedia Driver:

This one was baffling for a bit. This is the driver for the SD card reader, but the driver installation file that applies to the chipset will not install. We had to go about getting it to work in an odd way, but we documented everything 🙂

We had to manually go into the device manager and install a new IDE ATA/ATAPI controller using the 3rd party driver (R141246.EXE). After the driver was installed we rebooted the laptop.

Once it booted back up there were redundant IDE controllers that installed. Remove them and they will not come back again. hen remove the redundant IDE controllers that were no functional. Once you have installed the driver, the Ricoh media card devices should be installed and functional.

Do you have a laptop that came with Vista that you need rolled back to XP? Call Schrock Innovations toll free at 1-866-496-8772. We haven’t been beat yet.