Maybe someone here can help with this:

Last night I talked my Mum through the process of reinstalling Windows on her Dell Inspiron something-or-other (2400 I think), over the phone.

Everything went ok, until we came to reinstalling drivers. The way Dells work (which I didn't know) is that you stick the 'Resource CD' in, it'll run an application that does a quick scan of your system and tells you which drivers from the CD you need to install, with handy 'install' buttons. The problem was that because the display drivers hadn't been put on yet, everything was using the default driver so was in 800x600, so the whole thing wouldn't fit on the screen.

This, coupled with the general ineptitude of my mother and the fact we were doing it over the phone meant I have no real idea where she should be going within this application. Can someone with a Dell (and who ideally, has done this before) explain what this application is like, or (ideally) post a few screenshots or something of what she should be seeing so I can get a better idea of how to help?

(Posted here instead of 'Hardware' as more people will see it, and the experts in the hardware section generally have their own rigs, not Dells)

EDIT: Until the chipset drivers are installed, the network won't work and she has no other PC so can't download drivers from the net.

/thread?

http://support.dell.com/suppor ... temID=DIM_PNT_P4_CEL_2400 (Make sure its the right model, i took this on the "2400 i think". I hope it helps.

Quote from LFSn00b :

Have you tried asking her to change resolutions? It's a simple thing but you need to try everything to make something work

Tried that She said the slider only had one position it could be in.

Are you SURE you need to use the driver CD? At work we restore a LOT of laptops and my "superiors" seem to like to use the Dell OS CD, then chose the drivers manually which takes a ****ing age.

A lot of the Dells have a hidden recovery partition (press "F8" on Bootup, then "Repair My Computer", then you should get a GUI for the rest) where all the drivers are already slipstreamed into the recovery process.

That sounds interesting. So that would put all the drivers onto a fresh install of Windows?

Quote from Crashgate3 :

Maybe someone here can help with this:

Last night I talked my Mum through the process of reinstalling Windows on her Dell Inspiron something-or-other (2400 I think), over the phone.

You'll have to rewind a bit mate...

Why was your mother doing this and what happened up to the point of needing to rescue the whole system?

If she got that far I would guess that she may have changed a bios setting conflicting with initial setup, check shared VGA mem size or default bios back to factory settings.

As Jakg said, every notebook is shipped with a recovery partition which is simply a copy of the rescue CD, the CD offers more options and tools to work with incase of a total disk failure, but the last thing you should do is use the CD.

As above press F8 just before Windows starts and just after the bios screen, some manufacturers have different names for the recovery partition like "bootable add-in cards".

All of the CD's are designed specific to the notebook they are shipped with, there should be no need to install any third party drivers of any kind at setup, if you do this is failure on the manufactures side to supply a correct working setup...

It's not a notebook, it's a desktop.

It had just got so full of crap that it had pretty much ground to a halt (taking about 7 minutes from boot to be usable). There's nothing actually 'broken'. We did go into the BIOS to change the boot sequence so it would boot from the Windows CD but that's it.

No, Dell ship a recovery partition on the laptop (with all the drivers, bloat etc), and then a proper Windows CD and then a separate CD full of drivers - you have the ability to create a "conventional" recovery CD using the software on the laptop.

I see, have yet to purchase a Dell anything(thank God)

Dunno why I though it was a notebook, sorry, my bad...

Have you tried opening the side of the case and shitting on the mobo?

Works for most Dell's and I seen the tech guy's using this method in PCworld just last week, the guy told me that even though their methods may seem unconventional it's all they could think of ATM

Your new sig just made me snort coffee all over my screen at work

I had to format my Dell a couple of months back and I had to use the Resource CD for the drivers.

I don't know if it's the monitor, but I was able to change my resolution prior to getting the video drivers.

Could it be that the application window isn't maximised so she can't see everything on it? That said, you'd still be able to scroll around.

None the less, i've attached a screenshot of what it should look like. Very easy to use.

Ah, fantastic

What happens when you click the links to each item (I assume the blue text are links)? She said she just got information about it and no option to install anything.

Quote from Crashgate3 :

Ah, fantastic

What happens when you click the links to each item (I assume the blue text are links)? She said she just got information about it and no option to install anything.

Should get an option to extract once you click the link.

To show you, i've just clicked the top one on that big list, even though I don't need it.

Hope it helps.

Excellent, thanks very much

Woo! We did it

Thanks everyone, especially beefyman

No problem. Being Dell you would've thought they'd put everything on one disc, but they have to complicate things by having two! Shock horror, two discs!

Glad you got it sorted out.