Hey all. I recently did a fresh install of Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron notebook. It came with a disk with all of the drivers and applications that you need. All of the drivers worked except for the video card. It is an nVidia GeForce4 4200 Go card, and in device manager it has the stupid "video controller (vga compatible)" thing. But I installed the drivers, tried updating the driver from device manager and pointing it in the right direction (where the driver installed) and even downloading it from the dell support site. Windows just won't see the driver. So any suggestions to get this working would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

Which Inspiron model laptop?

It is an Inspiron 8500.

Driver
nVidia GeForce4 4200 Go, v.6.14.10.6742, A06 (support.dell.com/support/downloads/format.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&SystemID=INS_PNT_P4_8500&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=3996&typecnt=2&libid=6&releaseid=R88792&vercnt=5)
Release Date: 12/1/2004
Description: Nvidia GeForce4 4200 Go Video Driver


BIOS update
nVidia GeForce4 4200 Go, v.4.28.20.31.C1, A05 (support.dell.com/support/downloads/format.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&SystemID=INS_PNT_P4_8500&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=3996&typecnt=2&libid=6&releaseid=R71801&vercnt=3)
Release Date: 1/21/2004
Description: Nvidia GeForce4 4200 Go Video Bios

These are the correct drivers for this laptop. If you used any non-Dell drivers, you must clean all those off the machine before attempting to install the driver from Dell. Sometimes a manual clean is required, eg: removing certain files from the INF folder and from the registry.

Please explain what happens during installation.....

Well I already installed the actual video driver you linked. The install process went through just fine, I restarted, and it was like nothing happened. I haven't installed the video BIOS yet. Do i need to install the video BIOS BEFORE i install the video driver? Or does it even matter?

only install the video bios if your current bios version is older than the posted one. It doesn't matter but I would try updating it now, then see if the driver will take.