For a MORE STABLE SERATO experience after dealing with more and MORE frequent USB Dropouts I took the leap of DOWNGRADING a machine that Dell swears will only run with VISTA to Windows XP Professional.

FIRST GOOGLE & DOWNLOAD a file named DPC Latency Checker

You will probably find that when you run this program on a VISTA machine you will find several 'spikes' which just mean TROUBLE. anything YELLOW or RED which is what I was seeing every so many seconds is just plain BAD. What you want is a steady GREEN trail which stays in the GREEN and from my own experience no matter what background services or programs I turned off... NOTHING would help..

This leads to a complete FDISK and SYSTEM DOWNGRADE at NOON this past Friday. At first I was completely shocked when the advisors ad DELL told me this machine will not run on Windows XP. I just for the life of me could not find the logic on a computer built stricty for 1 operating system. I GOOGLED for about an hour and here is how I made everything work! I do not guarantee your own experience if you go ahead and do this but mine worked flawlessly and now SERATO (including VSL) just hums! Good Luck!

Here is a summary on how I did manage to downgrade it.

First of all, I downloaded all the necessary drivers from Dell and other sites as listed below. (GOOGLE THESE AS I WON'T POST LINKS)

Ricoh Memory Card Drivers:

Broadcom 59XX 10100 Ethernet Controller Driver:

Broadcom 59XX 10100 Ethernet Controller Utility:

Creative Labs Laptop Integrated Webcam:

Dell Touchpad - Pointing Stick:

SIGMATEL STAC 92XX C-Major HD Audio:

Dell Wireless 1505 Draft 802.11n WLAN Mini-Card:

UPEK Fingerprint Reader:

Things got a bit tricky when installing the display card. First GOOGLE and download the display driver 'Nvidia nVIDIA ForceWare X 169.09 for Windows XP/2K 32bit' and extract to a folder. Next download the modded inf file replace it with the existing file and then run the setup files and everything should work perfectly well. Phew! That was a relief.

Make sure also to download the following update.

-Microsoft XML 6.0
-Windows Installer 2.0 Redistributable (Windows Installer service update)

You won’t be able to install drivers without these files.

The Installation..

Setup the boot sequence to boot from CD 1st. To do that, enter the CMOS setup by pressing F2 during startup before windows loads.

Next, Change the SATA to ATA so that XP will be able to detect the HDD without any problem. I manage to locate all these setting in the BIOS.

I got an XP CD and was able to boot up from the CD. I made to 2 partitions 100 GB and 138GB the other. After following all the standard procedures in installing XP, I got into the legendary scenery of the green hill (XP Standard background).

Next is the driver installation which is pretty straight forward but I went thru some problem because I did not install the patch I mentioned earlier. After I have installed all the drivers, I noticed t

here a yellow exclamation mark on SMBUS. This is actually the chipset driver and need to be installed manually. The chipset driver cannot be installed. The reason being is that the hdd is running on ATA which does not require a driver. It uses the windows default driver.

Yeah everything is working perfect as plan but I had one problem. The total memory of the Dell XPS M1330 Notebook is 4 Gb but under the System Properties, it show only 3.5 Gb. What happen to the balance 0.5 Gb? Well after doing some research, it something to with the address on 32bit OS. This is too technical so I am not going into details. Basically what it means is that some space on the memory have been allocated to be use for other devices such as BIOS, networking, PCI Express and so on and to cut long story short the missing space is taken up by these devices. Only way to get back a full 4 Gb RAM is to installed a 64bit OS like XP 64bit version or Windows Vista which already running on 64bit and has more address range and can support up to 128Gb of memory.

OK that it.. Good luck!