Downgrade Dell Inspiron 1525

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Posted on June 01, 2012

Everyone has their reason to stay with a older operating system such as Windows XP. This is our story with downgrading the Dell Inspiron 1525 from Vista.

You will need the Windows XP SP2 installation disk. Without the sp2 disk , the install will fail because the harddrive can not be detected.

The install went fine without any errors. Now its time to install the drivers. Using the service tag on the laptop, you can locate most of the drivers on Dell website. We encountered issues with the base system, audio hd , and sm controller . We tried windows update and this still do not resolve our driver issues.

1) Audio driver issue : install the Sigmatel audio driver , but notice the Audio HD driver did not auto install. You will need to tell the system the driver can be found in c:\dell\drivers\R180043\HDMI

2) SM controller : the drivers for this can be found at http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/cs-013541.htm

3) Base system drivers fix :

To fix the issue, you need to go to Dells device & drivers website, and go to the Inspiron 1525 drivers site. Then, choose Windows XP, and once that site comes up, you need to choose Chipset, and download the Ricoh driver. There is only two of them listed, one is a Intel for your regular chipset, and then the Ricoh driver for you flash card driver. Here is the actual link to the correct driver you need to fix all three “Base System Device” bangs.

I hope this information save you plenty of time. We took about 48 hours to figure all this out for a old operating system.

Categories: Windows