Configuring the Dell XPS M1730 Laptop

So far so good with the new laptop.  I broke the RAID mirroring between the two 200Gig hard drives and installed Vista x64 Ultimate.  Since this blows away all of the drivers and other Dell-installed software, I had to hit the Dell site and pull down the 64-bit Vista drivers. 

Graphics Card Woes:

Pretty much all of the drivers, including software for the built-in webcam, were covered on the Dell site except for the graphics card – an nVidia GeForce 8700M card – no 64-bit drivers to be found.  Tinkering with the "preview" capability inside my Pictures folders resulted in a black display instead of the expected preview.  I also ran into problems with connecting an external monitor or connecting to an LCD projector.  They just weren’t being picked up using the stock nVidia driver.  Some searching on the nVidia site revealed a Beta driver for the card that, once installed, seems to have fixed both issues.  Hopefully they’ll follow through and get a final release version of the driver out the door.

I installed Visual Studio 2008 and promptly installed the Web Development hotfix that ScottGu blogged about.  So far so good on that front as well.

I pulled down Virtual PC 2007 (64-bit version of course) and installed that and I’m pretty impressed with the performance I’m getting from my old XP Pro VM that I copied onto the second hard drive.  I used to run that particular VM on an external USB drive and it is downright fast on the second internal HD in comparison.

Now it’s time to start making a list of what other software goodies I’ll need to load up to get productive on this machine.  I’ll share the list next time I blog.