Vista on Inspiron 6400

[david6400]

I started this thread because I was surprised that nobody else had created threads dedicated to the Inspiron 6400 notebook. For a popular choice right now, it really should have had a link on how to was compatible with Windows Vista. My 6400 predated the "Vista Premium" placard (I bought it last march). That being said, this walkthrough of my experience applies to all people wishing to switch to Vista, though particular to the 6400

Here are the pertinent specs:

Intel Dual Core T2400 @1.83 GHZ

Hitachi 80gb Harddrive

1gb ram on 2ddr

ATI Radeon X1300

The main differential in making the switch to vista is the graphics card. For those of you who went with the integrated one, which is fine for XP work, be forwarned that the famed Aero Mode may not work for you. For those of you who know you didnt get the integrated one, you either have the same video card as me, or you have the X1400. I have a friend who has the X1400 and it works fine for him as well.

In regards to disk space, I found that vista took up an abnormally large amount. When I first decided to install vista, because I had no idea if it would work on my notebook I used Norton Partition Magic to create a twenty gigabyte partition on my hard drive, so that I could install vista there and use both XP and Vista. I got the technique for Lifehacker.

Those who want to experiment with Vista before making the switch would be well advised to explore this option. I tried a couple other ones, but apparently Vista RC1 and Beta do not support Installing to a removable disk.

Back on track however, you can use partition magic to use already available free space on your existing partitions to create another without affecting your existing data; translation, you can use partition magic to safely create a new boot drive for vista without compromising your existing XP partition. You may however, compromise the Master Boot Record, which will disable your Dell System Restore. I honestly don't know if it will however, as I have already crippled Dell System Restore a couple months ago inadvertantly. (it is notable that methods exist to Fix Dell System Restore as well as work arounds once you have crippled the master boot record; I myself used a work around a few months ago and it worked flawlessly).

Moving on to the installation, it went off without a hitch. Vista properly recognized everything and installed on the drive completely within roughly one hour and ten minutes. I had my account setup rather quickly. It is notable that the first time I installed vista a few weeks ago, It was the beta (RC1 came out two days later lol). Beta went very well, immediately recognized all of my base hardware: sound card, wireless card, optical drive, the USB ports, media buttons; the works with the exception of my internal bluetooth chip. A week later, I installed Vista RC1 as an upgrade to Beta. RC1 as an upgrade didnt do as well. It didnt recognize my bluetooth, and it kept saying that three Base Hardware devices couldnt be recognized. I installed the bluetooth manager from the drivers disk the laptop came with, and from there both my bluetooth wireless mouse and my motorola bluetooth headphones were immediately recognized.

For those with the Motorola Bluetooth HT820 Headphones; they react to Vista differently than they reacted in XP. In XP, the headset was recognized as stereo headphones, and in Vista it is recognized as a mono headset/microphone. This significantly decreased the quality of the sound, (It was being transmitted in telephone line mode). For a 200 dollar pair of headphones, most people probably wont be very happy with this, so those of you who already own the headphones and those who have vista RC1 and are planning on buying the Motorola HT820, beware. The cause of this quality loss is the missing Bluetooth drivers for it. (if anyone has the solution to this problem, please do let me know, I cant go on much longer without them).

I decided that I liked the look, feel, and software interface of Vista over XP, so it was time for a big shift; I decided to shrink my XP partition to minimal size so i could fully utilize Vista. When I made the shift, Vista was disgruntled and wouldnt boot anymore (most likely because it saw its partition had increased in size). I therefore had to use the "repair" function. The repair function however, didnt seem to do a good job. It was missing the holy grail of plugins, the fabaled rundll32. This, as you can imagine, crippled the graphic and softwar interface of Vista substantially. I don't know if this is a result of my actions or if others have experienced similar problems with the Vista cd repair. The files, however, were unaffected and using my XP partition I stole the few important files I had on it very easily before reinstalling vista. This time, Vista had no problems with Base System Hardware drivers. On this premise, I would recommend clean installing Vista over upgrading from Beta for example. It makes your life much easier and makes for a much more stable system overall. The Bluetooth headphone problem still exists however.

On my XP partition, which is 20 gb, I have a few of the essentials. AOn my Vista partition, now 50 gb large (the 80 gb harddrive has 70gb after formating and the DSR partition) I have installed a wide variety of programs, all of which work flawlessly either by default or when ran in compatibility mode in RC1. I Installed:

Office 2007 Beta

Visio 2007 Beta

Office Presentation 2007 Beta

Adobe Professional 7.0

Adobe Indesign 4.0

FireFox (latest version)

Itunes 7

Windows Media Player 11

Real Player

VLC (Video Lan player)

Utorrent

Audacity

Videora Ipod Converter

Cucusoft Video Converter

WinAVI video converter

Quicktime

Dorgem

DB poweramp Music converter

NVU

DIVX

Google Earth

Messenger Live

I repeat; all of the above applications worked flawlessly on Vista. It is notable that VLC when running however, forced Vista to go to its default them over Aero, which while slightly disgruntling isnt that big a deal.

I also play my fair share of counterstrike. I installed counterstrike, day of defeat, and Condition Zero plus deleted scenes within Steam without a hitch. The graphics however lacked what was neccessary. On advice from another forum (I apologize, I cant cite which one i can not find it again, if the person who advised this is here please do take credit for an awesome job) I installed 3Dmark06 from futuremark. This installed DirectX 9.0 in parrelel with Vista's native DirectX 10.0. Be warned, this would appear to have significantly decreased the transparency affect of the Aero theme, so if this is a problem for you be appraised.

That being said, 3Dmark fixed the problem of Counterstrike, though it didnt seem so at first. I had to switch the Video Interface from Software to one of the other options. From there, the graphics, dare I say it, seemed even better and smoother than they did in XP.

I also tried to install Shaw Secure as my antiviral, but I still havent been able to get it working; right now im depending on a combination of the current Windows defender and firewall and myhardware firewall. Therefore, for those who use shaw secure, you may have to trust in windows (dare I say it) if you choose to switch to Vista.

At this point, I am so impressed with Vista that I will undoubtedly be willing to fork out the 200 bucks for the upgrade in a couple months. Those with the inspiron 6400, be not afraid of this operating system. For the average user it does the trick nicely. I consider myself a power user and this is certainly enough. Vista also makes great use of our dual core; my boot time is thirty seconds tops; and when waiting at the boot in screen, vista doesnt just sit around with a thumb up its butt, it startsup the logon processes that are applicable to all accounts; meaning that time lost at the boot in screen isnt time lost at all. The graphical interface works well, and dont be fooled by other sites saying you can get that interface with things like tuneup and StyleXP; you simply cannot. I have tried and you simply cannot get this kind of interface in XP.

I hope this has been helpful to all of those 6400 users wishing to move up in the operating systems ladder, to my knowledge Microsoft is still giving out keys for vista RC1. If you were hesitating about the move before, I hope I have helped to aleave your fears.