Hi 15milerd
You are going to find that it is a Dell issue because Dell uses the old ATI driver{s} .
I had many problems with the ATI driver{s} from Dell.

The new driver is ATI 7.7 and it work very well go to
www.ati.amd.com
and download the driver for the
Intergrated/Motherboard RadeonXpress.1150 chipset and install it,
it comes with a few other drivers for the PC motherboard as well
I just installed the 7.7 driver on my Inspiron 1501 it has no problems
But before you do this make sure you have {updated Vista}.
After you get it installed go to control panel
to perfomance and information and tools and see if you need to
update your score.
If your PC is locking up on you , you may want to use another PC
to do the download the driver it is quite big like 37.5 mb,s.
If you have any other problems you can post back here for more help !
See Yea
 

Thanks C3PO5 I will give it a go tonight. I would send it back but I need a computer for out of town work for the next two weeks if this doesn't work Dell will be replacing this lap top. Thanks agin

15milerd

Hay

I am glad it worked for you it took me a lot of time to find

the fix for it !:smileyvery-happy:

Yes hope others do read this it does work !

Good Luck:smileyvery-happy:

 

  

Thanks CP3O5 I think it worked, not one crash all day!:smileyvery-happy:

Dell needs to fix this issue:smileymad:!

 I hope those with a 1501 crashing will read this, easy 5 minute fix.

I have my Inspirion 1501 for almost a month and have the same problem with crashing.  Dell support has not been able to help.  I read the advice for updating the ATI driver and called Dell with the information.  Tech support doesn't seem to read the boards.  Anyway remotely the tech removed the old driver and installed 7.7.  On the third day after the install I had another crash.  I am really frustrated because it sounds that getting a replacement isn't the answer.  Does anyone have another solution ? Thanks   

Hi Texasrox

There are several things that could be the problem it would hard to tell you

what the problem is without knowing what you have installed on your computer .

I had problems right out of the box so the first thing i did was remove Mcafee

because i do not use it anyway and it does slow it down,

Then still and problems so i removed all of the goggle stuff because it would

stop the windows side bar from working .

These are the 3 thing i removed from my system .

But the ATI driver was not removed it was upgraded from the Dell driver to ATI 7.7

Removed Mcafee and installed Avast free for home use .

Removed Goggle desktop and tool bar .

If you have installed any other software you might try and remove some of it also.

I never install any thing until i get the system running stable to start with.!

And how much ram are you running i know Dell has sold the 1501 with as little

as 512 mb of ram witch is the lest Vista will run on mine came with 1 gig i upgraded

to 2 gigs .

You say yours is crashing when does it crash and how does it crash ?

1 how much ram do you have ?

2 what software are you running have you installed any thing that was not Vista ready

or that you can run in XP computable mode

3 are you running Vista Home Basic

4 do you run any heavy games on it or even light games can be a problem.

Can you give us more info on your system more the better to help you with !

I have no problems running Vista 32 or 64 bit now but i do watch what software

i put on it and the hardware i hook to it .

Post back here i will try to help you !

See Yea

I appreciate your offer to help.  My laptop has 1918 MB RAM and is a 32 bit operating system.  I am running Windows Vista Home Basic.  There is a AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual Core Proessor TK-5 1.70 GHz. 

 

The problem with crashing started before I added any software but since this is my first laptop, I thought it had to do with power settings.  I paid for McAfee but did have to disable the email blocking since that interferred with the Vista blocking.  Do you recommend completely removing this or just disabling features?

 

I have added Family Tree Maker, GenSmarts, itunes, and Palm desktop.  The Palm desktop has to be run as administrator - the Vista version is still in beta. 

 

I don't do any gaming.

 

Crashes have occurred when I am on the Internet, looking at email, and using Word.

 

I have never had this sort of problem with Dell desktops which I have had for years.  I don't know if this is a laptop or Vista problem.  Thanks for listening.

I will take your advice and delete everything that isn't specifically Vista compliant.  Since I had this problem before I loaded any software I think there is another problem but I should eliminate other possibilities.  I will let you know what hapens.