I just got a inspiron 1720, with the new 45nm cpu and 4gb of ram. In order to fully take advantage of the ram, i want to remove the Vista home premium on the laptop, delete all the partitions, and start a fresh install of vista 64.
However, i have heard that doing this is not quite as easy as one would do it on a desktop.

My specific questions are:
1) whether i need any specific drivers to load up (via USB) before the actual OS installation? if so, which ones?

2) Do i need to change my hdd setting in BIOS from AHCI to ATA? (What does this even do?)

3) Also, has anyone done this before, or can anyone point me to a nice quide please?

I have never done this on a laptop, and this laptop is my brothers, so any help is greatly appreciated.

Just use the bootable Vista DVD will do. I had my Inspiron 6000 installed with Vista 32-bit. I only have 2GB RAM, so 32 works for me.

Best is to reformat your hard drive to have a clean install.