alienware m5500 help please

[mumbumcrumb]

I've recently purchased the above mentoned laptop from a legitimate seller on ebay, aparently it had been used previously only as demo stock.
the laptop came preloaded with windows vista[hp] although i suspect the system was originaly bought with xp.
anyway this seller seems to have done a bodge job installing drivers and whatnot.
the alienware m5500 comes with a dual boot graphic card system then lets you either boot with the intergrated intel chip or from an external mxm2 card [this is apparently a geforce go 6600 128mb].
when i try too boot from the external card i just get a white screen, also on the device manager, there are 2 intel integrated cards installed and no geforce, we've downloaded drivers for the ext. card but we have attempted installing these but vista seems to overide it. do we have to boot with the ext. card in order for these to work.

also to make matters worse the laptop cant see the optical drive, nothing in device manager, checked the bios and it isnt there. there is power to the drive and disks can be insterted and the drive spins but its as if the drive is disconnected from the mainboard.

there were other drivers missing but we have resolved these as they werent too difficult [audio drivers etc]. these two are just proving a problem as we are obvously reluctant to unscrew the back of our [reletively] new laptop

here is a link to the page i brought it from:
Alienware Laptop - Area-51 m5500 - Gaming Laptop on eBay, Alienware, Laptops, Notebooks, Computers Networking (item 230153411502 end time 27-Jul-07 22:33:19 BST)
thanx in advance

n.b. apologies for typos and etc im usng a different laptop with a broken keyboard....

[PCRR PC REPAIR]

If your in London PCCR unit can help with all your problems