Dell Poweredge SC420 XP video card drivers

I'm a Dell nut. I admit it. I've had nothing but horseshoes with Dell machines.

I bought a used Dell Poweredge 2300 with dual P2-300 cpus. It was noisy but it was dual CPU system. It also produced a lot of heat, but that warmed up my basement during the winter months.

I bought my next brand new Inspiron 4150 laptop with the works. I loved that laptop. It has a P4 1.6ghz cpu with 512mb memory and a 30gb hard drive. I am still using it today, aside from a temporary setback of broken LCD hinges which forces me to use a docking station and an external monitor (more on that in another post).

Then came the Dimension 2400, the Poweredge 1550, the set of Poweredge 750s and the Dell Poweredge SC420. My reason for buying Dells? They are cheap and I haven't had a problem with one since that first dual cpu system (granted, the laptop had its fair share of problems but due to its age and the wear and tear that it endured).

Regardless I love my Dells even despite their quirks, and trust me every Dell has a quirk. My Poweredge SC420 I picked up for $499 ($575 w/tax) and is my fastest system. A Pentium 4 3.4ghz initially with 128mb of DDR2 ECC memory.

It's first quirk was the requirement to run DDR2 ECC memory. I don't know why I didn't pay attention when I bought it, but ECC memory was expensive and hard to find, not to mention the fact that it was ECC DDR2 ! I did some digging and it turns out that non-ECC DDR2 worked fine so I ordered 2gb worth on eBay for a decent price. Everything works fine.

Remember, this system was labelled as a "server" and was intended to be used as such. This was my second mistake. There were no drivers for the onboard Intel graphic card. Most of you are probably thinking, well you should be using AGP or PCIe anyways. Granted, for all you gaming deadheads who buy $1500+ systems to play games when you should've bought a Sony Playstation/Microsoft XBox ! This system was to be my primary system ... audio, video and development so I needed XP drivers. Unfortunately there were none. Only for Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.

I won't go into the lengthy discussion of "hacking" the crippled PCIe slot and what some people on the Internet have risked to achive this hack.

So after some digging I ran across a website called PowerEdge Forums which had an active discussion on the Windows XP video drivers issue. Essentially, the solution was to install a software patch to fool Windows into thinking the onboard graphics chip was actually another almost identical Intel chip with Windows XP drivers. Then, install the drivers for that card and off you go! The tip actually worked and I've been using it since, but after a recent re-install of Windows XP I could no longer find an active link to the drivers and patch.

So, here you go:

1. Unzip and right-click the ".inf" file and select install for the software patch : SoftGMA005.zip

2. Reboot the system (if it hasn't asked you already)

3. Install these Windows XP drivers from another Intel video card that actually works in XP : win2k_xp1416.exe

Enjoy!