Black with White Stripes - White with Black Stripes

[nodeinfo|35|body|0.54921900 1196373550][inline_autoadd][image=1]The title of this article is probably a bit confusing. For those of us slow ones, I am referring to a Zebra, but at the same time making reference to the Dell Inspiron Line of laptops.

Why would I refer to these laptops with a Zebra quotation? You'll soon find out.

About a week ago, my neighbor gave me his old Inspiron 8200. I immediately went home and formatted it with a clean copy of XP and got it working great. This I came across a friend who had an old c series docking station. A few minutes searching Google showed me that the 1978U C-Series dock is compatible with the Inspiron, so I took it off his hands.

When I got the Dock set up, I set the laptop onto the track and slid it back, but instead of the familiar *click* I was used to hearing from my days working with C series laptops, the laptop instead refused to dock. A quick flip around to the back of the machine showed that It had a small metal plate screwed on to cover the hole for the dock latch. I carefully pulled off the trim of the laptop and removed the plate. I then slid the laptop back into the docking station and heard the nostalgic *click* I was waiting for.

A quick press of the power button and I was in business, or so I thought. Instead I encountered a very foreboding error:

A NON-SUPPORTED DOCKING DEVICE WAS DETECTED. TO AVOID DAMAGE, PLEASE REMOVE THE DEVICE IMMEDIATELY. YOUR MACHINE WILL NOW POWER DOWN.

At this point I was completely befuddled. I hopped on over to the Dell support site and did a search for the 1978U and 8200 machines. This is where i learned the dark truth about Dell...

The Inspiron 8200 is a C840 with a different BIOS, is an M50 with a different BIOS.

That is right, the Inspiron, Latitude and M50 are all the same machine. Same motherboard, processor type, chipset.. EVERYTHING, with a different BIOS to make them act differently - AKA: Reject unsupported hardware.

I also learned from the Dell support forums, that it is possible to flash the Inspiron BIOS with the C series equivalent - in my case the C840. The floppy drive method of flashing is REQUIRED for this task, and to my dismay I have no Floppy Drives. Therefore, I spent another 15 minutes searching Google and found a website that graciously offers bootable ISO images of the BIOS files.

After carefully reading the BIOS flashing directions about 4 times through, I went to work.
Booted from the CD...
Error: This BIOS is not compatible with your machine.
Force the install anyways...
Reboot.

It was this moment I feared the most. Would my machine boot with the new BIOS installed?

The Dell screen appeared.. The model: C840. It had worked! i then allowed the machine to boot into windows and install devices (all device drivers had to be redetected and installed due to the new BIOS). A quick shutdown and I once again place it into the dock.

*click*

I power the machine on and hope that the computer gods are with me. The machine fully boots into windows, installs the devices from the dock and we are set.

A wiki article will be created to help those of you who would also like to use a C series Dock with your Inspiron machine. Please note that the 1978U is actually 20W underpowered for the 8200, and does downclock the processor to compensate.