Dell XPS 700 - XP vs 7

Dermot2468

I recently got a 2nd hand Dell XPS 700 that was destined for the skip.
The main specs are as follows

2 GB DDR2 Ram (4 x 512)
2. GHz core 2 duo processor
Nvidia 7950 Quad SLI (4 x 512 mb)

I have 7 on it now and tbh I'm not 100% happy with performance, I've had to mess around with drivers a lot as 7 drivers aren't available form dell for this machine.

Would I be better off with XP since the machine was designed for this OS? or should I stick with 7? Perhaps a dual boot might be best?

Fysh

Based on the Dell Support page Vista is supported on it but not 7, which means that driver issues aside, 7 should be fine.

However, driver issues are never that simple. One thing to bear in mind is that you can probably upgrade the memory - RAM is dirt cheap at the minute and a couple of 2GB DDR2 DIMMS wouldn't cost much. According to the manual (PDF, 20MB) you can go as high as 4x2GB non-ECC DDR2 DIMMs.

Another thing to consider is your graphics card - the GeForce 7950 GX2 is a pretty nice card, but it's also 2006 vintage. A newer card, if you can spend the money on such a thing, would probably make life easier. Nvidia do have a driver for this card under Windows 7, but I've had mixed experiences of using NVidia's own drivers for Dell machines so there's no guarantee it'll work.

Dermot2468

Yeah I was thinking about taking out 2 of the 512 sticks and putting in two 2gb sticks to bring it to 5gb ram. Does that sound reasonable?
I should be able to get them for not much more than €50

I tried the 280.26 driver you linked to and it caused blue screen errors when loading games. I'm on a driver that windows automatically retrieved now. The screen goes black a lot as if the graphics card is resetting its self, games work but I get dropped frames except on very low settings.

I'd rather stick with the current card as I got the machine for free and would prefer to spend as little money as possible getting it working.

Fysh

Yeah, I've seen similar issues myself on my home desktop when it comes to old graphics cards. There's not a great deal to be done for it unfortunately.

I'm not sure I'd bother leaving the extra 512MB DIMMs in myself, but there's no harm in trying it. It's probably worth trying out XP on it if you want to use it for gaming, as the driver support is there - but 32-bit XP will only let you use 4GB due to 32-bit memory address space limitations.

Dermot2468

Just trying to install XP here, I downloaded XP professional 32 bit SP3. I tried it first and got a blue screen just after it loaded drivers - 0x0000007B, 0xF78DA524..... I think it was missing the sata drivers, I tried slipstreaming in the drivers using nlite. Still got the same error.
These are drivers I added

http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&l=en&s=bsd&releaseid=R132417&SystemID=XPS_700&servicetag=9GHMF2J&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=9711&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=2&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=0&libid=41&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&source=-1&fileid=175966

http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&l=en&s=bsd&releaseid=R132416&SystemID=XPS_700&servicetag=9GHMF2J&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=9711&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=2&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=0&libid=41&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&source=-1&fileid=175963

Where these the right ones or is something else wrong?
Thanks

BostonB

You shouldn't really have an issue with W7. I have W7 64 on far older machines than that and most dells are based around a generic Intel board and chipset. What specific issues are you having.

Personally I prefer XP but it limits you with RAM. Though theres nothing in Windows 7 I see as a "must have".

Dermot2468

Window's 7 just seems a little slow, I know its an old machine but it should be faster. The hard drive seems to be constantly in use, the screen flashes black every now and again. When playing games they can only access 512 mb of video memory despite it having 2 gb (sli doesn't seem to be working properly).

I wanted to try out xp to see how that runs seen as driver support is much better for this hardware.

Btw its a nvidia chipset afaik

BostonB

I don't know about the gfx issue. Maybe you've a faulty card, or bridge? Or maybe as you think its a driver issue. Its seems very specific. Does it run ok on one card?

W7 loves to work the disk. Even with disk indexing turned off, it still does it. I've never got to the bottom of random disk access on any of my machines with W7. People say it stops over time, but I've it installed for close on 2yrs and it still does it.

Dermot2468

I don't think its the card or the bridge, I'm trying the dell recommended vista drivers ill see if it works.

I suppose I'll stick with 7 for another while and see what I can do with it!

That makes sense with the hard drive, do you think it would be worth while setting up a raid configuration to speed up hard drive access? I should be able to get two identical hard drives to put the OS on.

BostonB

What you need is a SSD for speed. Raid for the desktop doesn't cut it anymore. With a SSD I don't you'd even notice disk access in W7. Can't justify the cost yet myself.