Greetings, I'm working with a Dell Inspiron 9100 Laptop. It was originally running Windows XP. However, it had some pretty nasty worm/virus/spyware problems, so I have decided I would just like to reformat the drive and install Windows Vista (along with some hardware upgrades). My question is, will the installation of Vista be a thorough enough formatting of my hdd to "delete" all the spyware, or will I need to use another formatting utility like DBAN?
I believe the specs are something like: Pentium 4 3.2 GHz (Prescot) 512 MB DDR3200 80GB HDD ATI Radeon Mobility 9700 (128MB I think) I think my total XP installation with files is taking up 30GB out of my 80GB. Is there anything I left out?
get more ram if using vista. the 9100 supposedly maxes out at 2 gigs of ram. do a dxdiag at the run command line to see if the 128meg video is being used from the main 512 meg ram because vista will then be as slow as molassess. a customer with a new dell laptop that came with vista & 512 meg of ram had to upgrade to another gig because of onboard video & vista. vista supposedly uses 14gig of storage space just to install itself, just in case you didn't know compared to 1.6 gig for xp home & 2.1gig for xp pro.
I was looking on newegg and found that I can get two 1GB sticks of pqi pc3200 memory for about $120 all-together. So the two gigs should be better. I was debating about upgrading to a better processor. Maybe a multi-core. Do you have any opinions on that? One other thing I was wondering was about the graphics processor. Is it possible to upgrade that? I thought I heard of someone installing a Mobility Radeon 9800 in their inspiron 9100. Sorry if I'm getting off topic.
make certain that that person's Inspiron 9100 is not a desktop version as dell makes 1 of thos too. most laptops' onboard video are not upgradeable except for amount of ram assigned from main ram. see what your manuals say for dual core but don't be disappointed if can't use 1.
I was just browsing Dell's online documentation and found this in relation to the video card: (I guess you can remove it if you want to? But does this mean I could possibly purchase another card somewhere?) http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins9100/sm/video.htm#1006368 Here's a link where supposedly the graphics card is being swapped out: http://www.overclockers.com/articles1200/index02.asp I'm currently researching dell's owner's manual to see what type of processor it will accept, but no luck yet. Thanks for all of your help!
contact dell to see if they have videocards that fit your inspiron 9100 laptop & not the inspiron 9100 desktop.
