Shot in the dark, help needed on a rather old Alienware laptop

Jano

Jano

Jano

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I have a very old Alienware mALX Aurora laptop, massive 19inch dual sli thing thats sitting around gathering dust. My parents piece of trash HP laptop has died. I have a copy of Win 7 64 and an SSD sitting round doing nothing so I planned on popping the SSD and HD from the borked HP laptop into the Alienware, installing Win 7, and letting them play.

Now, surely I need to install bios and other items prior to installing win 7, as you normally would for a new install? I probably have the ancient bios that came with the comp on a disc somewhere, but how can I find an up to date one? Haven't a clue what the mobo is in the thing!
 
BIOS is "installed" as such on a hardware chip inside the laptop.

This is why, even if you remove the HDD, you will still be able to turn the machine on and get into the BIOS, or boot onto other media.

As for Graphics, Sound, Chipset drivers etc, yes you may have to install some of these, but only once Windows 7 has been installed. And, if you let Windows connect to the internet during setup, I would expect it to download most of the drivers itself anyway ;)
 
My concern is that when I tried to install Vista on it many years ago, I remember there being all sorts of issues with the internal wifi/graphics cards/sound card. Hopefully it won't have the same issue with Win 7 and it'll work ok.
 
From experience.. The Alienware's use some funky drivers for the graphics.

A Dell/Intel/Nvidia mash combo.. Meaning you cant just install the ones from Nvidia's website. My advice would be to go to Dell's/Alienwares website once its built, find your model and download the missing drivers from there.
 
No Windows 7 drivers available :P

Next step seems to be to try and cure a chronic overheating issue, I'm guessing reseating the cpu should be much the same as in a normal desktop pc?
 
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