Upgrade advice for two Dell Vostro Laptops, 1720 and 3550

I have two older Dell Vostro laptops:
Vostro 1720 Windows 7 Home Premium x64
Vostro 3550 Windows 7 Home Premium x64
For each one, when I go to the Dell product support site and enter the service tag, I get the following warning.

Product not tested for Windows 10 upgrade
Dell has not confirmed that this product can upgrade to Windows 10. Some drivers, firmware, applications, and connected devices may not work as you would expect.

I suspect that is a generic warning, but I'm wondering if trying to upgrade either one of them to Windows 10 at this time could be successful with regard to drivers.

Yes, that looks like a generic warning.

You'd likely have to pound the Internet to see if you can find instances of someone with those same models that successfully upgraded. The Dell forums would be my first place to look for that.

You might have to wait weeks or months so more people experiment on more machines. It's been less than a week so far.

"could be successful"? Sure. How big a deal would it be to you if it weren't successful? Mild annoyance? Near catastrophe?

Barring some over-riding need to jump on Win 10 right now, I'd wait.

I'm not sure if Microsoft has put up any sort of compatibility-checking web site to answer questions like this.

Thanks for your thoughts. I think waiting is sound advice. I tried searching google but I didn't uncover any results so far. I'll see what I can find in the dell forums. Again, thanks.

Michael Purcell said:

Thanks for your thoughts. I think waiting is sound advice. I tried searching google but I didn't uncover any results so far. I'll see what I can find in the dell forums. Again, thanks.

I made an account here just to reply to your question as I know how hard it can be to find information sometimes.
everything works fine after upgrade to windows 10 on my vostro 1720 laptop...I think you should be ok. I attached my device manager screenshot to show all driver are loaded properly. hope this helps.

I appreciate you taking the time to post your results. Based on your post, I think I will probably go ahead and upgrade the 1720 when I get some time in the next week or so, and perhaps this will also be helpful to others with the same computer.

I upgraded both Vostro notebooks this weekend. Both had video driver issues, and I want to update the post for anyone who might be looking for information on these two computer models.

The Vostro 1720 has the Nvidia GEForce 9600M GS notebook GPU. When the upgrade to Windows 10 completed, there was no driver found for the display, and Windows used the generic Microsoft video driver at a maximum of 1024 x 768 resolution. Dell has not provided a video driver for the 1720, but Nvidia has a Windows 10 driver that includes the GEForce 9600M GS as well as a slew of other versions, which can be downloaded directly from the Nvidia site. After the driver was downloaded, installed, and updated the video worked flawlessly. See here for the driver.

The issue with the Vostro 3550 was rather different and a little harder to fix. As it turns out, Windows 10 loads the correct and latest driver for the Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPU, but if the Vostro 3550 has a bios that is not the latest available, the display driver will not drive the laptop screen. In my case, the bios was version A09. The latest version of the bios for this computer is A11. After installing the A11 version of the bios, the computer display on the notebook screen worked without any other changes.

Symptoms on the Vostro 3550:

When the Windows 10 upgrade process gets to the screen where it is actually installing Windows 10, this is the screen with the circular progress indicator that pulses, the notebook screen display is still working. But when the first 1/3 of the process, downloading Windows 10, is complete, the screen goes blank, and nothing can be seen or followed afterwards. If the upgrade process is allowed to continue, the upgrade will complete but you wouldn't have any way of knowing this. Windows 10 will actually boot boot up, but you wouldn't have any way of knowing this.

However, it happens that if you attach an external monitor to the computer, the external monitor will work fine with the Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPU. If you attach an external monitor before beginning the upgrade process, you will be able to follow the entire process. Once the Upgrade was completed using the external monitor, it was a simple matter to go to the Dell site and download the latest version of the bios for the Vostro 3550. Upon installing it, the notebook screen immediately started working.

Hopefully this will save someone some time, and maybe even some hair pulling.

As far as I have gotten with these computers so far, there don't seem to be any other driver issues, unless maybe a problem with the fingerprint reader on the 3550, which we don't use.

I too had the problem of the blank screen and so after connecting another monitor I was able to complete the Windows installation after which I updated the BIOS to A12 then the screen was Ok.
After all of the above I then noticed the keys on the touchpad worked but the touchpad wouldn't move the cursor. After uninstalling then rebooting it seemed to work then a reboot notification popped up and after rebooting the touchpad stopped working again even after blocking driver updates in Windows Update and Policy editor.