I had the same problem loading Windows 7 32 bit Professional on my DELL XPS Gen 1 laptop which has XP Professional as the primary OS. I found old habit to be the problem as I instinctively placed a dash in between the character fields while typing them. After getting the Invalid Key prompt I looked at it to see if I was mistaking a D for a 0 or an 8 for a B and I wasn't and it was then I saw the statement that the dash was automatically assigned and wondered if that was the issue so I tried it w/o typing the dash and BINGO, that was the solution.
Hey fishnbanjo - I was getting ready to put Win 7 on my old Dell XPS Gen 1 and I am looking around for any gotchas. Since you have been there just wondering what you ran into. Thx - Lou
Had to type this in MS Word then paste it in since my last two attempts disappeared!
I would suggest that you run the Windows 7 Compatability Report first since you may have software that will need attention to run in Windows 7, I know I did and it allowed me to decide if it was still needed and to replace or update once installed.
I purchased Partition Magic in order to create a separate partition for Windows 7 in case it didn’t work and I decided to remove it, ended up I decided to remove XP instead and having it on its own partition made it a simple task of just formatting the partition it was on which then became the partition I use for software add-ons for Windows 7.
You more than likely have the Realtek onboard sound card which does not have Windows 7 drivers. Since we don’t use any of the bells and whistles associated with the card I found a Vista version which allows the card to work but if you are into manipulating sound bites and such you probably won’t be able to do it well. I had 2 XPS Gen1 laptops, one I used with a Sounblaster Audigy 2 USB card and the other is our spare laptop that we use at home in our sun room and travel with to our camp, that one uses the Realtek sound card and like I said we use it to listen to CD’s, watch the occasional movie or video clip on the internet.
I tested Windows 7 with several iterations on MS Office and found Office 2000, XP and 2003 all work very well with Windows 7 so if any of these are what you own you will not need to replace them. I did find bumping up the RAM on the second laptop to 1.5Gb made a big difference in performance over the 1Gb it had, the other has the maximum amount of 2Gb and runs just splendidly. I also found an Ati 9800 which is the 256Mb version of the video card that came standard with the XPS Gen1, cost was about $25 on eBay and it took less than 30 minutes to replace.
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I later swapped the hdd for a 160Gb and added a Blu-Ray-DVD/RW and a Belkin N PCMCIA network adapter and finally see how powerful this old warhorse is. If you need any help or more info let me know[/FONT]
