Dell Driver Download

Price when reviewed: £82 (£98 inc VAT)

There’s always a lot of debate when covering products that wirelessly send video from your laptop to your TV. To some they’re a Godsend, allowing you to control your viewing from the comfort of the sofa; to others they’re an expensive replacement for an HDMI cable. Belkin’s ScreenCast will likely reignite the argument.

Sleek and black, it looks like a miniature router, but don’t expect a router’s wide array of ports. Sticking to its core task, you get the choice of HDMI or composite video. Open Intel’s WiDi software on a compatible laptop, connect to the Belkin, adjust the picture size to fit the TV and start sending. That’s it. The ScreenCast is the very definition of the cable-replacing gadget.

Before you do any of this, however, there are some vital steps to take. First, as with the Netgear Push2TV , WiDi requires a laptop with a Core i3, i5 or i7 processor, Intel graphics and one of Intel’s latest Wi-Fi adapters – a full list of compatible hardware is here .

But that alone isn’t enough. On a brand-new Core i5 Dell laptop satisfying those criteria, performance was initially sluggish, and downloading Dell’s official driver set didn’t help. Instead, it’s imperative that you download drivers directly from Intel – the very latest WiDi, Wi-Fi and graphics drivers will ensure you’re running on WiDi version 2.1, which makes a huge difference to performance.

Streaming a 1080p YouTube video under Dell’s drivers had all four cores of the CPU running above 95% and proved choppy. After upgrading to WiDi 2.1, CPU usage fell to 65% and the video became totally smooth. Other 1080p clips also played fine – only BBC iPlayer’s HD video remained very slightly beyond the ScreenCast’s limits. It’s watchable, but not perfect.

The ScreenCast can send full 5.1 audio as well, and Belkin’s website claims it supports “Blu-ray movies”. If it does, we saw no evidence of it, with CyberLink PowerDVD 9 citing HDCP incompatibility when we tried to screencast a disc, even with all drivers up to date. We can’t say for sure that it wasn’t our test laptop, but nothing in it fell short of Intel’s specifications.

That aside, for its core task of sending web or local video files to a TV, the ScreenCast generally works well – better, in fact, than any of the other screencasting devices we’ve tested. But that’s all it does, and it’s hard not to conclude that this whole fledgling category remains grossly overpriced for its function. Were this a £40 add-on we’d have no hesitation recommending it, but at close to £100 it’s still a luxury we can do without.

Your questions about dell troubleshooting drivers ...

Enabling my speakers to my pc?

Like an idiot i disabled my speakers on my Dell PC with windows vista home premium, i have no idea how to get them back. They are plugged in but not recognized, today the computer stopped producing sound and said no audio output devices were installed. Which is why i thought re-enabling them would help but, the option to re-enable doesn’t exist.

This computer’s hard drive is dying thus it wont boot, it rarely boots ( i’m getting it fixed ) i thought of restarting to maybe the speakers are recognized. But the computer has absolutely no sound.

The audio drivers are current and up to date, i had them checked at the intel website.

High definition audio drivers <–

troubleshooting tells me to go into Bios; advanced > Peripherals. Set HD audio link and BF/FP audio to enable both and set high definition front panel audio to enable. save and exit.

wondering if that might work, but the actually question is how do i get this computer to recognize the speakers.

they are not listed on audio devices like my mic or headphones. I’d like to know how i can enable them.

I’m running windows vista home basic, intel prentium Duel processor

recents actions were, me trying to boot the computer with the windows vista ultimate installation disk, or rather upgrade vista so i could use it as a boot. i canceled and this caused the computer to actually start back up after almost a month. ( got back on it because the other old crappy Dell died on me as well, blue screen of death ).

I updated windows

You sound decently versed in computers so I will spare you the details.

Go to, http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/ Just type in your service tag and then it will give you drop down options to what drivers you want to download, its pretty easy.

If you can’t find your service tag :http://supporteuro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/root/identifyyoursystem?c=uk&cs=ukdhs1&l=en&s=dhs&~mode=popup

Once you find your driver save it to your desktop and just open it up, it pretty much does the rest for you.

I have a dell inspiron 5150 with a 64 MB GeForce go 5200. The problem is that it lags on a lot of games, old as hell or as far back as 2005. I’ll be playing Driver for instance, and it’ll just go from normal fps down to 2fps, and same thing on MAME games. The only thing that seems to be running good is the Zsnes super nintendo emulator. It’s not just games, even visual effects in windows media player.

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