lexxion, you are THE MAN.
Tricking Windows 7 to not being able to reinstall the generic vga
drivers was clever, and finding the
driver that worked is golden.
Anyway, used
Lexxions Guide on a Dell 700m and it worked perfectly.
Had a bit of a weird scare tho...
The laptop is a bit old and installing the
drivers took forever, at least 60 sec. The screen almost immediately went black but the HD kept plugging away. Eventually heard the found new hardware trumpet sound twice, then the HD light stopped. I moved the trackpad, nothing. Hit enter twice, and then heard the windows7 shutdown sound, some more HD activity then a reboot. (I assume there was simply a reboot prompt window open I couldnt see)
Upon restart - viola!
Drivers installed with NATIVE RESOLUTION support! Had to manually change to 32bit color. Cant do anything fancy but the main thing is running native resolution.
Its really sad that intel and/or microsoft (mostly intel) cant provide at least simple
driver support for older chips like the 855GM... its not like they are uncommon, bizillions of notebooks were sold with them.
Again, thank you sooooo much lexxion.