I just spent the entire day and a half working on getting Windows 7 installed on my Dell Inspiron 11z Netbook… what a hassle. Just to recap: I ordered my Dell 11z last month a few weeks before the release date of Windows 7, and Dell offered a promotion to “pre-install” Windows 7 on certain machines if they are delivered after Oct 22nd. My order fell in this category, so I made my purchase with the belief that my Dell 11z would ship on Oct 25th with Windows 7 installed, and thus I would avoid the hassle of doing an upgrade installation and having to fight to find the right drivers, etc. Well, that didn’t happen. My Dell 11z arrived with Windows Vista installed, and after talking with Dell support several times discovered my only recourse was to get the Windows 7 upgrade DVDs from Dell and do the upgrade myself.
First of all, the upgrade installation came on DVDs and I do not have an external DVD-ROM drive. So, I had to do some Googling to figure out how to create a bootable USB flash drive, copy all the install files to it, and boot up my Dell 11z from this USB drive.
After doing the installation (which went fairly smoothly), I discovered that several internal devices (such as the WiFi Card, Bluetooth module, card reader) were not present on my system under Device Manager. Apparently, these drivers were not part of the “native” drivers available with Windows 7. So I visited the Dell web site to discover that most of these drivers are non-existent under the Dell 11z product for Windows 7 drivers and apps.
I decided to contact Dell tech support via the online chat, and I get someone who just runs me in circles doing a bunch of crazy stuff. He’s giving me links to download drivers and apps that just don’t work. Finally, he tells me my Win 7 installation must have “gone bad” and I will need to reinstall Vista, then Windows 7 on top of that. Go suck an egg, brother… I’m not doing that!
So my next move was to restore my Dell 11z back to the Vista OS-state by using Clonezilla and the backup image that I made just before I did the Win 7 upgrade. I then went through the system tray icons, start menu, etc. and wrote down every extra Dell driver and app I could find. I also made screenshots of the Device Manager output so I would know what I might be missing so far as devices and drivers.
Once I finished documenting everything, I reinstall Windows 7 again as a clean install. Now, Dell provided a 2nd DVD with the upgrade package labeled “Win 7 Drivers and Apps”, however, there wasn’t a user-friendly application I could run that would install the necessary drivers and apps for my Dell 11z. You needed to go through all the folders on that DVD and figure out which ones might apply to your system and try to install them. A real pain.
So, I downloaded all the drivers I could find from the Dell support site that seemed relevant for my Dell 11z under Windows 7, and also the Vista drivers and apps for anything that seemed to be missing from the Win 7 drivers. Even between the vista and Win 7 drivers/apps, I was still missing two key drivers: One for my internal WiFi card and the other for the Bluetooth Internal Module. Doing some keyword searching on the Dell web site popped up two drivers that seemed to be right (although I don’t know if they are the latest versions). Here’s the links for the two missing drivers:
Dell 1520 Wireless-N Mini-Card Driver and Bluetooth Wireless 365 Module Driver
Armed with all these drivers and apps, I began installing them one by one until all the devices and apps were back, just like under the original Vista OS system. I double checked the system tray icons and Device Manager and it seems that everything is present and working properly. Dell could have saved me (and probably many others) a lot of time by having ALL the correct drivers listed under the Dell 11z product.
NOW, I can start optimizing the system and installing my applications. So hopefully by the end of tomorrow I’ll have my Dell 11z ready for production use. If you’re in the same boat as I, good luck and I hope my comments will help out.
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