Welcome to A Tech's Life. The purpose of this blog is to provide insight to some of the simple and more complicated chores that I encounter during my day as a Computer Technician.

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Saturday, August 22, 2009

Windows 7 on a Dell Dimension 8300

My wifes cousin's came into town from the lower mainland this week for a visit and through discusions I discovered that it was one of thier childrens birthdays. So we decided to revieve on of my old Pentium 4 ht PC and throw Windows 7 on it for him so he could be the coolest kid in town.

He plays some old school Star Wars games so it should be a good fit for him.

Here are the spec's

  • Pentium 4 3.0 processor
  • Nvidia 6800 GT video card (agp)
  • 80 gb IDE 5400 HDD
  • Sound Blaster 5.1 sound card
  • 17 inch Acer LCD Monitor
  • 2 gb ddr 400 ram

Nice little gift for the young man.

Installing Windows 7 was not all that bad. It went quick with no hiccups.

Once installed the only 2 issues were the old fax modem, which i quickly pulled and tossed in the recycle bin, and the sound card. It took me a few minutes to track down a Vista driver for it and bingo it was up and running. It got a windows rating (whatever that means) 5.2 which is not bad considering my dell laptop (Intel DualCore2 2.4) only gets 4.9.

It actually seems to be a lot quicker then even XP Pro was. It does not like to mullti task too much, more then 3 or 4 programs at once and it start to lag a bit. But for a 5 year old PC it is working very nicely.

Windows 7 seems to be a very nice piece of work.

--KC

6 comments:

  1. Please, explain me how I can get that my dimensiĆ³n´s sound work

    thanks

    musicandres@hotmail.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi,

    It has been a few months, but as far as I remeber I used this driver download.

    http://www.haikuware.com/directory/start-download/drivers/audio/ich-ac97-driver

    But it has been awhile. It has a intel 875p chip set. So you may have to try a few different ones to make it work.

    Good Luck and let me know if you are still having issues.

    Kyle

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kyle,
    I am in the same boat (Dimension 8300 with newly installed Windows 7) and have been looking on the internet for a working sound card driver for a long time. The haiku site said the driver was not for Windows. If you can find the working driver, I'd appreciate it if you could post it here. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I couldn't even get windows 7 to start installing on the dell 8300.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Me too the same problem not able to install the Windows 7 on Dell dimension can anybody help me please

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is how i got my sound to work.

    Step 1: Download the XP driver from the dell website.
    Step 2: Download and install the program "winrar"
    Step 3: Right click on the XP driver for you sound card and click on extract to... extract the drivers to a folder.
    Step 4: Go start>control panel>Device manager. Click on sounds, vidoe and games.
    Step 5: click on the icon that is showing a yellow warning.
    Step 6: Right click on it and go to update driver software.
    Step 7: click browse my computer for driver.
    Step 8: find the driver you extracted and click next.

    ReplyDelete

Please feel free to comment if you see an error, have a alternate solution or if it help you out!