Help I have a dell inspiron 7500 that has xp

this is a good one I could not find anything in earlier posts so here goes. I have been laid off and a friend gave me an inspiron 7500 laptop that he put xp pro on. However it is not supported by this laptop Ie no drivers for xp on this model. How on gods little green earth can I reformat the hard drive and put on either 2000 or windows me. I heard that you can boot with windows 98 and go into dos and I tried that but it does not boot into it even though I changed the boot order in bios. any help??
thanks all

 

The laptop is old enough to where XP SP2 should have all the drivers built-in. I just checked at the Dell web site, and all the devices should be picked up by XP. If you could post a list of the devices that aren't installed correctly (check the Device Manager for question marks ? and exclamation points !) and post those device in the DRIVER forum (start a new thread there) we can probably track down the correct drivers.

(BTW- Windows 2000 drivers usually work OK with XP; WinXP may "fight" a little, but the drivers should work if "forced"; download the Win2000 drivers from this link)

 

I just acquired the same computer and want to put Windows 2000 on it. The link that you gave for the Win2k drivers is great, but there are no drivers for the chipset listed. Is it OK to not install the chipset drivers, or do you have a link to them. Did a search, but have not found anything yet.

 

Just wanted you guys to know that there is no need to download the drivers for Win2k. Win2k has all of them. That's why it says "Optional" next all of them. I used a Slipstreamed SP4 version of Win2k when I installed it. Very cool. Saved a lot of hassle.