Chris Meller

I recently purchased a brand spankin’ new Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop. I was absolutely amazed at the size, brightness and quality of the beautiful 17” display, and overall 100% pleased with the laptop as a whole.

These are simply a few of the more notable problems I experienced while re-installing Windows on the i9300, and a few of the quirks I noticed thereafter (along with some fixes / workarounds).

First, I absolutely refused to keep all the crap Dell loads on their machines by default. Even uninstalling it all wasn’t good enough. I forced myself to format my brand new laptop and re-install Windows XP Professional. After completing Windows setup, I soon came to the realization that they no longer ship driver disks with their laptops, since there’s a 3.5 gb restoration partition (which I could have used to restore my system to its original crap-infested state, but that wasn’t the point). Off to the web I went on my desktop, where I quickly found all the drivers listed on Dell’s website for the Inspiron 9300. After burning a quick CD (since my laptop at this point has no network drivers to connect to my network), I reinstalled everything and was back up in a relatively short time.

One quirk of the process was that, after installing the large system software package, several things didn’t install properly until I finally re-installed the drivers and rebooted immediately afterwards (ie: actually listen to it when it tells you that you need to reboot to complete installation… bah, there’s a first time for everything I supposed).

After getting everything else installed and running, I soon realized… No sound… Ahh! I desperately returned to the Dell website, in search of my missing driver. Unfortunately, as I had suspsected, it wasn’t actually there. Oh no! What will I do?!

UPDATE: As of this publishing, Dell has actually published a new Sigmatel audio driver on the 9300 downloads page. I have not verified whether it does, in fact, work or not, as I’ve got a working driver now, and no desire to screw it up.

Second, the media keys. Now, while these probably work by default in Windows Media player, I despise media player. As I’m sure many others do, I use WinAmp as my default media player in Windows. The volume controls, of course, work based on the Windows volume settings, but the play/pause and stop buttons (as well as the track navigation buttons) don’t function by default with Winamp. It turns out that this is a fairly simple fix, and simply involves setting a preference in Winamp itself.

Go to Options > Preferences > General Preferences > Global Hotkeys and check the Enabled checkbox. That’s it! Your media keys should now function properly in Winamp, just as with Windows Media Player!

Other than those two problems, I haven’t had any problems at all with my wonderful new laptop. Coming soon, I imagine there’ll be a similar article about my experiences with Linux on the Inspiron 9300 (oh yeah, all that Fedora Core 4 goodness baby!), so stay tuned…