Dell Inspiron 6400 - Three Unknown Base System Devices

I am not a fan of Windows Vista, which is the reason I still use XP. I am used to XP, have learned to make it work the way I want it, so I’m not in a hurry to upgrade.

About a year ago, someone I know purchased an Inspiron 6400 laptop from Dell and tried to get XP installed on it instead of Vista. They had no luck and ended up with Vista. Recently, they have decided to remove Vista and install XP on that same laptop, and asked me to do it. No problem, at least until I ended up with three devices that weren’t recognized by XP.

If you have an Inspiron 6400 and have noticed three Base System Devices in the device manager, then I will explain how to correct that issue in this post.


Hardware and Windows XP

As I mentioned above, I recently was tasked with installing Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron 6400 that once had Vista installed. The one problem I encountered was that all the hardware installed was new, so XP didn’t have any drivers included.

I went onto the Dell support Web site and downloaded the drivers to the local hard drive. I installed the chipset, video, sound, network adapter and wireless drivers without any issues. After I rebooted I noticed that I still had three unknown devices in the device manager.

Unknown devices in the device manager means that I still need to install some drivers. Unfortunately, the devices were listed as a Base System Device, so it wasn’t very descriptive to help determine what I was missing.

After a quick search on the Internet, I read that there was an additional set