My inspiron 1720 originally came with Vista, but I installed windows xp on it anyway.
It was a bit of a pain to get xp to work because of driver issues etc.
Do you guys forsee any issues if I install windows 7 on it? i.e. will I have to go out and search for drivers or should it just work automatically :)
It's fairly save to assume that Windows 7 will work on a machine that came with Vista
Gnoupi and I both checked the Dell site: no Windows 7 specific drivers. However the Dell site also states you should give the Vista drivers a go if you can't find them.
I suspect Windows Update will also find most generic drivers. Last case resort is trying the hardware vendors, which in the case of such broadly used model shouldn't be too difficult.
If Vista runs on this computer then it will be 'flying' Windows 7, however, to be sure to be sure, run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.
Dell doesn't offer any Windows 7 drivers for the Inspiron 1720, so you will have to hunt them down from the part manufacturers' websites (or use the Vista drivers if you can't find any, they should work).
The Stac 92xx C Media HD Audio Vista driver works with Windows 7, depending on your GPU, you will find Windos 7 video drivers at Intel or nVidia, get the latest touchpad driver from Synaptics, the rest should be automatically detected and installed.
Edit: If you find 3 unknown (base) devices after the installation, this is your card reader. grab the Vista driver from the Dell website (the Ricoh driver under "Chipset"), extract it (e.g. with Unversal Extractor) and install the drivers manually via the Device Manager.
just get the tool called double driver..this will do a complete backup of your installed, working drivers. Then just use those on your new Win7 install..
