Noob - Totally Confused

[tamorgen]

Hello all,

 

Last week I posted a post on the end of someone elses regarding installation of Mac OS X on a Dell Inspirion 1720 laptop. I got no responses, but, as I said, it was buried in someone elses post. I'm hoping someone can help me if I open my own post. My intentions are to take a Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop, install a new 320 GB Western Digital hard drive in it, partion it to dual boot. One parition will be Windows 7, the other will be Snow Leopard. The post I had read claimed that the 1720 is an ideal platform to install OS X. Well, great, but I'm trying to figure out where to start. There are so many methods out there, I'm not sure which I should use, and which is appropriate.

 

Here is what I have:

 

1. I have a old iMac G5 running Leopard that I can use to mount the DVDs and images. I am gathering that may or may not be one of the requirements, depending on which method you use.
   
2. I have the following Mac OS X DVD's available: Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard. All three are mine and legal. I don't think I'll need Tiger, but hey, I have it, it's there.
   
3. My system specs, identified from CPU-Z report file
   • Dell Inspiron 1720, BIOS A09
     
   • Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo T8300 (Penryn) @ 2.40GHz, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, EM64T
     
   • Northbridge, Intel PM965 rev. C0
     
   • Southbridge, Intel 82801HBM (ICH8-ME) rev. B0
     
   • 4 GB RAM total, DIMM #1, 2048 MB DDR2, SO-DIMM, DIMM #2 2048 MB DDR, SO-DIMM
     
   • NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS
     

[*]The following specs I know of, but I can't identify specifics from CPU-Z

• Intel Wireless Wifi link 4965AGN
  
• Not sure of the audio card. It was the base audio available, and only shows up as High Definition Audio Device under Windows Device Manager.
  
• Bluetooth, again, not sure which one
  

 

Okay, with that out of the way, what do I need to do with all of this information, and where do I go from here? My new hard drive should be arriving today via UPS, so I am anxious to get some feedback so I can get started.

 

Can I go ahead and install Windows 7 first, and leave a second partition available for Snow Leopard (or Leopard, whatever needs to go on first), or do I need to install the MacOS first?

 

Thank you for any help. I am just throughly overwhelmed with all the information out there.

1.