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Vista/Old Dell compatibility issues

1K views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  Niemtel 
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I sincerely apologize to anyone who sees this and the issues mentioned have been solved previously. :4-dontkno

Background: I was running MS Vista Home Basic on a Dell Dimension 4500S desktop for the past couple of years. Recently (about 1 month ago) it contracted a virus that completely corrupted a boot file and caused failure to load the operating system, and it wasn't able to go into safe mode. Long story short, I was forced to do an OS reinstall without the driver disc for the console, which I no longer have. My problem is 2-pronged:

1. I was able to locate the driver which I believe previously ran my graphics adapter on dell.com. However, instead of staying installed, Vista continues to reinstall the VGA adapter each and every time the system is restarted. I have no idea why this is and want to maintain a higher resolution but it won't allow this. It uses a taskbar wizard...?

2. I can't get Vista to tell me what my network adapter/ethernet controller is in Device Manager (it's "unknown"), and thus can't get the right driver. I tried opening up the console and looking at the NIC card? attached to the ethernet port and saw that it was clearly labeled as a NETGEAR FA311 Rev. 2B; thus, I went to Netgear's site and found a driver that should enable FA311-FA312 cards, but this driver did not work. However, I know for a fact that there is a driver out there that should remedy my internet problem, because like I said, I was up and running for at least 2 years with this configuration.

Has anyone here heard of these issues? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Rick G :grin:
 
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