Hi guys,

I have a Dell Latitude D520 laptop and a Dell D/Dock docking station. The
docking station has a PCI slot built in for standard PCI cards so when the
laptop is docked the extra device becomes available. Under Windows XP the
cards work perfectly when you dock the laptop. With Windows Vista they are
not detected at all - even if I reboot on the docking station or force a scan
for hardware changes. I have tried to install the Vista driver packages for
the PCI devices but they fail as no device is present in the system.

I have now tried with a Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy card and a
Hauppauge PVR150 TV Tuner card. I know both of these devices work in the
docking station because they worked under XP. I also know that they work with
Vista because they were formally both running perfectly in my Vista based IBM
desktop media center. When I look in the BIOS settings of the laptop when it
is docked it shows that the PCI slot is occupied so the laptop can tell
theres something in there but when it boots to Vista nothing happens.

I have spent numerous hours on the phone to Dell and they came up with
nothing except to say that as far as they were concerned the hardware wasn't
at fault as it works fine with Windows XP in the docking station. Any further
troubleshooting wasn't covered by my warranty. I have totally re-installed
Vista twice now in an effort to fix it but that didn't work.

Does anyone have any ideas for things for me to try? I really want to make
this laptop my media center instead of the big noisy desktop machine
currently doing the job. And I've already spent far too much buying the right
accessories and cables to do this I don't want to have to splash some more
cash to get a USB TV Tuner card as well.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks,
Dave Edwards

Just a quick update - I have installed Vista SP1 and this has made no
difference. Still not detecting any PCI cards.

I have formatted the laptop and gone back to XP SP2 and this worked. Until I
ran Windows Update and went to SP3 when it stopped detecting the external
cards again! I think this may well be a driver issues and something that Dell
need to look into.