Dell Inspiron N4010 XP Downgrade Instructions

The organization I work for is still currently using XP as our backbone, and now strain is coming onto us techies to keep XP chugging on new systems. I thought I was done for with this one, but I managed to get (what appears to be) everything working. The computer in question is the below, though close variants may succeed with tips in this article:

I use a handy utility ‘Driverpacks‘ which installed most of the drivers I needed. This is a very handy utility to have, but it’s also not dead simple. If you are a tech though, a coffee and 20 minutes should be enough to get a ‘stand alone driverpack install’ working. If you want to try this, take a look as it will help get the more common items. Be warned, lots of downloading if you want to try this.

All I *really* needed after running that was WIFI, however I will try to help with other areas if you wish to skip using Driverpacks.

TouchPad

When selecting your laptop at Dell’s Downloads and Drivers page you’ll (likely) already noticed that they only list Vista and 7. However some of the downloads will work fine under Windows XP. When running the uncompressed file R{whatever}.exe it will list if XP is compatible with it. The TouchPad drivers they offer work fine with XP.

Sound

Driverpacks found this no problem, however Realtek often has drivers for everything right on its website. Try here. Dell’s listed driver will not work.

Card Reader

While Driverpacks found this, it was appearing to use a universal driver. The file on Dell’s website works just fine and I’d recommend installing this regardless.

Chipset/Video

Easy one, go to Intel’s Driver Detect website

Bluetooth

Dell. Driverpacks does not include this.

Network – Wired

Dell works. Driverpacks work fine too.

Network -Wireless

Took me hours. It appears there are an assortment of wifi cards they use. From searches online, it appears more people have trouble with (but few solutions for) with ‘Wireless WLAN 1501 Half-Mini Card‘. Before continuing, there is something you must do, and that is identify what the Device and Vendor ID are of the Wifi card.

What’s nifty is that I have a neat program for doing this. What’s not nifty is that it doesn’t want to ID the card. Hm. Bug. Will work on that. For now you can use it just to highlight the card and look at the Hardware ID on the right side. Specifically at the four letters after VEN_ and DEV_.

If you have DEV_4727 you have what I have. A Dell/Broadcom DW1501 Wireless-N Half Mini Card. Solution, use drivers from the Latitude Series found here. The driver will not install on its own, you have to manually add the Driver though Control Panel -> System Settings -> Device Manager -> Update Driver -> Manually Select Driver -> I will choose location… etc. You have to run the initial EXE first, to get the files extracted to c:\Dell. If those do not work, you can also try these drivers for  the DW 1520.

If you get a different DEV_ number, look it up using this helpful site (which my program is attempting to use) and see if that gives you a push in the right direction!