audio driver winXP inspiron 1521

i can find audio driver for winXP 32bit sigmatel stac 92xx c-major hd audio on the support website, but only for inspiron 1501 and 1520, and what about my pc (inspiron 1521)?

 

can i use one of the other driver?

 

LF

Hello,

 

Jim this driver could be a working XP audio driver for sigmatel, Vostro.

 

This is the first audio driver that has worked for me on XP.  I tried many other things so I don't know if it was a combination of other things I've tried and then at last using this driver.   However, I'm not out of the woods yet.  During the install of this driver everything went well and starting hearing sound right away despite the fact I had restarted my computer which windows was bugging me to do.  All the audio was running great until I restarted and noticed that once again, no sound.  Then looked in the device manager and noticed the exclaimation mark through "SigmaTel High Definition Audio CODEC".  I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver you posted and it's working again.  I have yet to reboot to see what will happen.  I will keep you posted.  For those of you wondering if it's possible to do an install of XP and get it working well with a new Vostro the answer is yes.  I officially have every device now working beautiful with the exception of waiting to see if the audio driver will keep up.  Don't get me wrong I've been at this for a couple of days getting the drivers including using a version of "forceware" for the G-force 8600.  Just about all the drivers are available from dell but you really have to look and find older XP versions for the hardware.  However considering all, XP is smoking on this latest generation Vostro 1700 with all the upgrades.  I bought this model on Sept. 16th, 07.

 

Good luck all, I know a lot of people are banging their heads against the wall trying to get XP working on theVostros and other Dell notebooks. 

Jim you are the man.  Followed your last directions and audio is here even after reboot.  To think I was planning to return this Vostro1700.  See the salesman ensured me that there would be no problem for me to install XP of course I expected a similar installation to that of a desktop.   I called tech support and they said it would almost be impossible right now but that maybe in the future XP drivers would come out for them.  Now Jim I definately have some more questions for you please.

 

Are all the XP device drivers for Vostro1500 in the link you have above compatible with the Vostro1700?  I'm guessing the answer is yes at this point. 

 

The only way I could get XP to see the internal drive was by changing 2 things in the bios.  I had to disable "flash cache module" and the other thing was switch "AHCI" to "ATA" option.  I read somewhere on this site that someone said that this work around is a huge performance hit for the hard drive and maybe some other resources but that there may be a way to find a usable HD controller driver.  Could you elaborate?

 

I'm guessing the best thing to do would be to leave the bios defaults for the controller for performance.  I purchased a floppy USB drive, I was thinking that maybe there is a driver (did I hear someone say matrix maybe?) that can be installed after holding down F6 during XP installation.  I'm guessing that if we can use the right driver to get XP to see the hard drive controller, XP will recognize the drive. 

 

I have XP installed with the "ATA" setting in the bios so I'm guessing that if I change back the bios to the other setting that my current XP version won't boot and the MBR could even become corrupt, is this true?

 

Also before I managed an XP installation. I tried to completely reformat the drive using the Vista Installation Disk but everytime I created a partion the Vista installation program would say new partition2 indicating that there was still a partition I couldn't see so I ran winternals and seen there was a 86 MB partition with an unrecognized disk format.  I managed to delete this in Winternals.  Could you please tell me the importance of this unknown-format partition?

 

My goal is to have a XP installation on the first partition which I understand should be installed first.  And then install Vista on the second partition and it will create a new boot loader thus creating a dual OS boot drive.   I've heard it's hard to install XP after Vista is installed.  If you have any suggestions/warnings about how to do this please let me know.

 

Last question I would love to order another 3 Vostro 1700s by the end of October but I'm wondering if the hardware will change by then and the XP drivers from the Vostro1500 might not work!  Any thoughts?

 

Thanks Jim, you are by far the only support I received from Dell and you are making them money!

Guys look at Jim's message:

 

"we got a report that the Vostro 1500 XP Sigmatel driver works on the 1700. I checked and found that the 1500 and 1700 share the same Intel Mobile Chipset driver too. If yours doesn't survive the reboot, give this a try:

a. Install Dell Notebook System Software (click the + sign next to System Utilities).

b. Next and very important, install the Intel Mobile Chipset driver (click the + sign next to Chipset).

c. Finally install the Sigmatel R158235 audio driver (click the + sign next to Audio).

These items would be on this downloads page:

Vostro 1500 XP downloads

Jim"

 

Using these instructions I got audio to work on my 1700 in XP perfectly and for that matter every other device works too with these drivers.