Vista M1530 to XP Pro M1530

I am the owner of a Dell XPS M1530. If you were to follow that link, you would see all the wonderful things that being the proud owner of an M1530 would get you; sleek design, speed (3GB RAM), big monitor, etcetera etcetera. There is one bad thing about M1530 though; it comes default with FREAKING VISTA!!!

I enrolled in college in January of 2008 and needed a laptop to do all my schoolwork on. If I was going to have to fork over some of my hard earned cash for a laptop, I didn’t want a crappy one; I figured I’d go all out (a restrained all out) and get something newer, nicer, and something that would be relatively top of the line for about 90 days. I had never delved into Vista and heard all the horror stories but, at the time, the world seemed to be embracing Vista. I figured that being with me being an IT major, I ought to at least know a little bit about Vista.

Whenever I go out on a limb and go against the grain and embrace something that everyone else is knocking, I tend to get a little defensive. So when my Vista “crash-proof” laptop had the blue screen of death in less than a week, I conveniently deleted the event from my memory like everything else that was on the computer. After a complete reinstall of OS and everything, I was on my way. Well, on my way except for several Dell components which took a little longer to catch up; for example I had to type in the WEP key every time I changed from one wireless network to the other – regardless of how many times I had been on it before, regardless of the countless network card driver installs and reinstalls.

Miraculously, one fine morning 4 months later, my laptop remembered a WEP key and I only had to re-enter everything 1 more time. Isn’t it amazing how you do the same exact process over and over again to a computer expecting results and nothing happens. Frustrated you give up resigning yourself to the fate of doing things the long way (like entering a WEP key every time you change networks) when computers are supposed to enable you to do things the fast way. Then one day, on chance, you repeat that step that has become so familiar to you and, miraculously, the computer accepts it and it works. Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” It’s apparent to me that Al was fortunate enough not to have lived in the modern computer era.

Other than my brief early confrontation with Vista, I was fairly impressed. The GUI had a nice sleek design, and it was very easy to pick up the new way of doing things. I was so used to navigating easily and flawlessly through XP, it took me a little bit to learn the in and outs of Vista. Finally I realized why Vista was so easy to learn.

Vista, apparently, was created for people over 58 (no computer knowledge) and children under 3. There is not one advanced thing that you can do efficiently on Vista. Vista was made for not even technologically challenged people, but technologically retarded people. I would laugh to myself before cursing under my breath for 5 minutes while I read all these comments about the “ease” of networking Vista with XP machines.

Finally, upon chance when I was bitching about Vista to my brother-in-law, we decided to “evolve” (or is it reverse evolution?) from Vista to XP Pro. I had to blather about something to warranty a blog post on this but I cannot steal someone else’s thunder; they have done a fantastic job describing the steps to doing this migration at this forum post.

The thing that makes that link so great, is the availability of the drivers. It took me maybe 2 or 3 hours to uninstall Vista and install XP, maybe an hour to install all the drivers, but it took me 3 hours just to find the drivers. The problem I had was that since M1530 only comes to the factory with Vista, I couldn’t find any XP drivers for it. This forum poster has conveniently put together a package of all required drivers for converting a Vista OS M1530 to a XP Pro OS M1530.

Good luck and congratulations on your evolution!