Dell :: 1730 XP Video Drivers SLI Working Correctly

when I got the 1730 from Dell, right out of the box I was getting 15,500 on 3DMark05. I installed Dell's 'new' driver on their site and it lowered to around 15,000, so I rolled back to the original 'pre-release' driver and it popped back up to the original scores (this is stock, non-overclocked, btw...when CPU is cranked to 3.4Ghz, it gets ~17,000). This was dandy, and I was very happy with the performance of pre-release drivers.

So many games didn't work with Vista, or else worked badly (i.e. crashes), that I decided to reformat and put XP on there. Well, I figured I'd put the video drivers from Dell's Reinstall CD on there, thinking these were the same 'pre-release' drivers that were allowing the better scores in Vista. BOOM: I get 10,000 in 3DMark05, a 1/3 performance decrease! Believe me, I tweaked the driver settings just like I always do...SLI is definitely 'enabled' in the driver page, but the computer performs as if it is DISABLED. So, thinking it's a driver issue, I upgrade to the 'new' drivers on Dell's Support site, and BOOM: same issue. I'm so pissed off right now, I can hardly type, as this is LOWER than my 1710. For $4000, I could have bought a lot of hookers and coke, so this laptop may be going back with extreme prejudice if a solution isn't found in the next five to seven days.

There are threads about this in other forums around the net, but none of them I've found have any real workaround or solution other than 'we'll have to wait for Dell or Nvidia to properly support SLI.' Even the 'pre-release' driver on the system when it ships is not available for download anywhere, and I believe it's Visa-only anyway. Does anyone have a solution for this problem? Hell, is anyone else HAVING this problem? I PM-ed Progneta yesterday, because I thought he had had the same issue and fixed it, but the more I thought about it, the more I figured a separate thread should be started concerning this problem, since it's pretty basic and very crippling. SOMEBODY at Dell should have caught this, since I know for a fact the engineers over there EXPECT people for format their machines when they get them (i.e. this is marketed to an enthusiast crowd, and they know it).