I have recently purchased a Dell Inspiron 1521 laptop, and was unable (and did not want to) use the pre-installed Vista. Since installing a copy of XP, I have been unable to find the appropriate drivers for my audio controller, wireless card, and other bus controllers. Dell is not helpful, as this computer was designed for and shipped with Vista, so these issues are not covered by the warranty. Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks to all!

Try this page at Dells website. Do not use your service tag to lookup your machine or the search will pull up vista drivers.

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/...&hidlang=en

Did you happen to write down the description of the Vista components in the Device manager before you installed XP over it?

My friend did not ask me for help until it was too late to get the descriptions from the Vista OS, however - I was able to find the specs on the Dell website. Check it out: (It is the Inspiron 1521) http://www.dell.com/content/products/produ...~tab=bundlestab

Thank you for your time - cybermel

The problem I see, is that they have several different Wireless for the same system, so its hard to say which one he has. I wonder if his paperwork would give details on the wireless. The audio, I don't see any information on the type of audio, maybe that might be in his paperwork. Just a thought.

I have successfully found my drivers!!!! It took some digging on the Dell website, and quite a bit of reading through their user forum, but I was able to find them and install without any problems. Thanks to those who replied! Happy computing

Can you share with us where you found them? Or do you want us to do the digging too?

For office networking purposes (as well as working with what licenses we had available) I ended up wiping a couple of 1521s and loading XP Pro 64-bit. I've identified the following drivers/utilities that work with 64-bit XP:

R140747.exe - Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN MiniPCI Card
R158235.exe - SIGMATEL STAC 92XX C-Major HD Audio Driver Version A09
R163694.exe - AMD Radeon Xpress 1270
R147130.exe - Conexant D330,HDA,MDC,v.92,modem diagnostics utility verion A00
R141763.exe - Ricoh R5C832,R5C833 Driver Version A00 For MXG061; Precision: M90 (for those unidentified Base System Devices)
R150157.exe - Conexant D330,HDA,MDC,v.92,modem driver Version A01

I had to get the ethernet driver directly from Broadcom's website, but it was a Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller.

Still unable to find the 64-bit SM Bus driver for XP. The ATI SMBus Driver loaded without complaint, but still didn't work.

Good points here about audio and video drivers if you're planning on using XP on the 1521:

http://www.driverheaven.net/mobility-radeo...ess-1270-a.html

The short of it is, go to the dell driver download page and input your notebook as a Dell Latitude D531, this ships with the same graphics card and audio as the 1521 but comes with XP hence you can use these drivers.