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I have an old Dell Inspiron 3000 which came with Windows XP. It's still quite decent, 3 GHz P4, 2 GB RAM.

I've installed Windows 7 RTM (x86) and the best resolution it will do is 640x480 with a generic driver.

It has an integrated Intel 8265G graphics card, and only PCI slots on the motherboard. I cannot stick another graphics card on it.

Can I get a working driver for Windows 7? Official Dell website only lists Windows XP drivers

Am I destined to have the suckiness of Windows XP on this computer forever?

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3 Answers

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I am putting this out there in case someone else runs into this issue.

The Intel chipset is on-board. I discovered the reason for the crappy resolution in Windows 7 was that the memory to share with the video card was set to 1 MB in the BIOS. I changed this to 8 MB (the maximum) and after the PC rebooted I was able to select a higher resolution.

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Fantastic answer! This worked for my Dimension B110 as well. I had all but given up on getting Win7 video working until finding this tip. – Roger Dec 28 '09 at 22:50
oooh 8mb! can you overclock it, too? ;) – bobobobo Aug 16 '10 at 19:57
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Download the official Intel drivers from here. Look for the Vista drivers as they are the same for Windows 7. Dell should have drivers available for Windows 7 at the time of public release.

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I tried installing generic Windows Vista drivers and the installer told me that the operating system wasn't supported. – jjnguy Aug 31 '09 at 2:44
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I was about to suggest to check Intel's site for drivers, but they don't have any Vista or Windows 7 driver neither, the latest driver dates back to 2005.

Your best bet is to use a graphics card with PCI connection.

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protected by Diago Sep 7 '10 at 8:40

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