Studio 1558 drivers for Windows 10
As I mentioned in some other recent blog entries, I recently installed Windows 10 (x64) on my Studio 1558 computers. Note that this was a clean install on a formatted drive – if you do an in-place upgrade from an earlier version of Windows, things may behave differently.
Windows 10 (LTSC 1809 in my case) installed without any difficulty, but even after installing all of the Microsoft updates, some device drivers were still missing. As Dell never officially supported anything newer than Windows 7 on the Studio 1558, it isn’t a simple case of going to the Dell support page for the 1558 and downloading drivers. Some older drivers will install correctly, some will complain that they are for a different Windows version or will install but give errors when used. I have collected the device drivers needed to clear all of the “Unknown device” errors that show up in Device Manager. The system could possibly benefit from additional drivers such as the Intel chipset driver, but it functions perfectly without them. You may not need all of these devices – my 1558 has just about every option imaginable.
The drivers you may need are:
- Wireless 365 Bluetooth module driver (says it is for the Wireless 380 module, works with the Wireless 365)
- ST Microelectronics Free Fall Data Protection driver
- Ricoh Card Reader R5C833, R5U230 driver
- Dell QuickSet application
- DW5808 LTE Mobile Broadband and GNSS driver
- DW5808 GPS Rollover fix
- DW5620 Mobile Broadband driver
- Verizon Access Manager (VZAM) for DW5600 and DW5620 application (not needed for DW5808 card)
I am listing Verizon Access Manager for the DW5620 even though it is not strictly required – after installing the DW5620 Mobile Broadband driver, the cellular modem will show up as a usable device in Windows 10. However, if you rely on the native Windows support you won’t have access to the usage data that VZAM provides and as I mentioned in my post about the newer DW5808 module, Windows 10 has no native SMS support. The Mobile Broadband SMS Toolkit mentioned in that post works with the DW5620 as well, so you can use it to send and receive text messages.
I have installed each of these drivers on my Studio 1558 and they all work properly under Windows 10 x64. It is extremely unlikely that you are running the 32-bit (x86) version of Windows 10, since you’d be limited to under 4GB of RAM which will make the system pretty unusable – install the 64-bit (x64) version, even if you only have 4GB of RAM installed. Note that you can upgrade the Studio 1558 to a maximum of 16GB as I describe here.
I have verified that each of these files is downloadable as of March 2nd, 2021 via the link I’ve given. Vendors may re-organize their web sites, so if you are reading this at some point in the future, those links may not work. I have mirrored each of these drivers (with additional information in the filename so you can see what the file applies to) here. If at all possible, you should use the official vendor downloads and not the ones here since you don’t know if my files have been tampered with or not. I have verified the MD5 checksum (when available from the vendor site) with each of the files in my mirror.
