Almost no response from windows 7..angry wife

i have attached a screen shot (hopefully) of what is listed in device manager. Which one should change when installing the chipset.

Try looking at the actual properties of the Intel stuff. It should say what drivers are there. Not just looking at the Intel part. Although, the other thing you might want to look at is the Storage Controllers sections, as that is where I am seeing my Serial ATA drivers being loaded.

Yes i have done that for example

x38/x48 Express Chipset processor to I/o controller says

Driver provider: Microsoft
Drive date: 21/6/06
Driver verison: 6.1.7600.16385
Digital signer: Microsoft Windows

Under Storage Controllers the only entry isIntel SATA RAID Controller properties being
Intel
8/4/09
8.6.2.1012
Microsoft windows.

I am assuming since the new driver is dated 22/12/09 that it the SATA driver is the right one to be looking at the date would have changed. Also the "roll back driver2 button is greyed out on every one of them implying they have never been updated.

To amuse myself I tried installing from the other win7 upgrade disc I have to eliminate issues with the media. This has been an even bigger failure. Firslty I got a message saying that "Windows setup could not configure windows to run on this computers hardware" followed by "windows could not compelte installation" and quit. Tried a second time and this time seemed to complete but at no point gave me the screen to create a user accoutn and computer name. Instead it went straight to a login screen but no idea what user name and password it was expecting. 3rd time got exactly the same.

First time I used DISKPART, but other 2 tried I simply did a cusotm install and formatted the disc.

No idea where to go from here. The amount of time I have wasted of mine and the long suffering forum members makes me think to give up and buy a new pc and burn this one.

I was waiting to hear what performance was like when I read now you reinstalled to amuse yourself.

If the performance dragged and was dysfunctional after trying all available chipsets then you can conclude there is a reason Dell doesn't provide Win7 drivers for this model.

If not, and only isolated issues surfaced which can themselves be troubleshot then do you have a System Image from before you reinstalled for fun? I believe you said you had gotten the Backup image to work.

From the sounds of it, he was still having problems after trying to reinstall it, twice.

He hasn't really gotten a serious backup copy at all. The only thing I can partially conclude from the fact that trying to redo the install, twice... And having even stranger problems, something is failing on that system. The problem is, since I can't see what he is doing on his system nor what is going on... It could range from just confusion on what we are trying to have him do, hardware failure or monkeys are involved.

sounds like the system is going bad, just buy a bare bones system on new egg, and get a new ram and cpu and toss in the old hard drive and dvd drive,

As Keiichi25 says I would have wanted to bet I had a decent system image as although the backup list said there was file there all the errors generated around creating it and inconsistency gave cause to question if this was a solid base to start from.

On the subject of chipset still no one has answered my question. I tried installing the latest driver from intel for my chipset X48 which is dated 22/12/09. None of the items in device manager has properties listing that date, only earlier and have no option to roll back. I am a complete novice, but common sense says the update hasnt worked. Is this the case or could it have worked and i shouldn't expect the properties details to change?

Before I surrender I have tried my 3rd disk and it has successfully installed overnight. Once i have got the activation sorted I will try and get a system image.

Ok so activated and jsut took the first 2 security updates that were unavoidable. Created a primary second partition on same HD to try the image on.
Incorrect Function 0x8007001.

Any ideas as clearly independent of the installation. Should I try the 42 pending windows updates and try again?

As an experiemnt I reconencted and booted form the RAID assembly i.e. the old OS. I performed a system image onto the same partition I have been trying and worked with no problem or error messages. So what's the difference? I guess this elimianted all hardware issues and must be related to updates or drivers (I assume drivers are HD specific?) in the new OS?