It appears that with the release of Vista, Microsoft changed their driver model, at least as relates to video drivers – they went from XDM driver model to WDDM driver model, and while Vista supported both driver models, all OSes after Vista support only WDDM drivers. It turns out, that having the Vista driver available was good enough. Usually that’s no problem, as the typically hardware support gets “baked into” later OSes, but not so for the ATI x1300 – what to do? On to the Device Manager, and what I found surprised me – the ATI x1300 wasn’t supported by Windows 8.1! (see below)Īfter a bit of googling I found that the ATI x1300 is now considered a “legacy” product and is no longer supported (by either the hardware manufacturer or Microsoft) – a quick check of the Dell website confirmed the last supported OS for the OptiPlex 745 was Vista… Windows 7 and 8 had no driver support listed on the Dell website. My first thought was to check the Windows Experience Index, as that usually can give a very quick indication of hardware that might be holding the system back – then I remembered that neither Windows 8 or 8.1 have “Windows Experience” numbers available. Once the install completed, everything seemed fine – audio, video, networking, all worked “out-of-the-box”, but I sensed something was holding the system back – performance should have been a bit better.
(You can download an evaluation copy that is good for 90 days from Microsoft at no cost.) Booting from a DVD ‘burned’ from the downloaded ISO file was straight-forward – pressing F12 during boot-up presented me with a boot menu, from which I selected the DVD drive, if you prefer to boot from a USB key, Microsoft makes a very useful tool available called “ Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool” that will take an ISO file and prepare a USB key to boot and install the OS (this toll works for Windows 8/8/1 despite the name of the tool). The OS install went without a hitch – my machine is fairly robust (a Core 2 Duo E4300 CPU, 8 Gigs of RAM, a 500 Gig SATA HD, and an add-in ATI x1300 video card w/ 256 Meg of RAM on-board), and the install of evaluation copy of Windows 8.1 圆4 from DVD took about 20 minutes.
I recently picked up a Dell OptiPlex 745 desktop and wanted to see how well the hardware supported Windows 8.1 – it turns out it supports Windows 8.1 pretty well.
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