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In other news...
It's just been pointed out to me that I typed 'Freeola' rather than 'Freehold' on a property website! *blush* :¬)
To be fair the pages were still being validated.
It's how I slowly convert my clients to Freeola!
FREEOLA on the brain!
[s]Hmmm...[/s]
Or I disown him.
Even with Dell’s of recent years the install of XP is not straight forward as they have AHCI enabled by default which native XP does not support. If you install XP it will blue screen and go in a boot loop. You need to go into the BIOS and change the hard drive mode into legacy first.
Credit to Dell though as the XP driver support for Vista supplied machines is excellent. You just need to tap in your service tag on the support site.
Sometimes this can be a quick an easy operation and other times a nightmare.
We don't really have much info from the OP. For example if it's a DELL machine (or similar) you will have a resource CD along with your OS (Windows disks). This resource disk(s) will contain all the drivers you need. But if the PC has always been Vista then this won't help much as you'll need XP ones.
Often I format the drive, install XP and then use Everest diagnostic utility (you can use the free trial version) to find out 'what's inside' the PC.
I then download the latest drivers as required. It's always useful to have access to the internet from another PC to get any missing drivers or look up error messages!
If you've got a late(ish) version of XP it normally gives you a working PC without too much trouble allowing you to connect to the internet to sort the rest out.
But it sounds as if perhaps you might be better off finding a geeky friend to help you do all of this :¬)
[s]Hmmm...[/s]
It doesn’t matter if it’s a laptop or desktop. The first thing to do is go to the manufacturer’s website and download all the drivers. Cheap desktop and laptops from PC World like Emachines and Advent are near impossible to get drivers for. A few of the big manufacturers are not supplying drivers for XP now.
There is a good chance you will need the SATA controller drivers which you need to copy to a floppy disk and call by pressing F6 as you start the XP install or windows installer will not be able to see the hard drive. Windows XP had no native support for SATA controllers.
Some laptops and desktops have bespoke graphics like Sony. I’ve had to modify existing drivers to get them installed. A number of machines have HD audio and you will have to install a Microsoft update before the audio drivers will install on XP (KB888111). Windows updates will not download it. You have to manually search for it and download. Some drivers now need things like Netframework, MSXML6.0 and Windows installer.
If you do decide to go for it make sure you have everything you need before you start.
Install the chipset drivers first. Then the Graphics and the rest can be done in any order. Its best that this is all done offline and Antivirus is installed before you put it on the internet. The Bugbear virus is still out their and in tests it took something like 8 seconds to get infected on an unpatched machine.
I see many computers with home installs where the hard drive is running in PIO mode and the computer is running really slow and people don’t even know their machine is limping along with pitiful data transfer rates.
I would advise you to do a memory upgrade if required and install Windows 7. That will do most drivers for you. It runs as well as XP and if you buy the professional version you can download and run a virtual copy of XP as well free of charge.
> I'll second pete_21's advice.
Woo hoo !,I believe that's my second useful tech post this year.There's hope for me yet ! :)
I see you've 'quoted/replied' to me but I'm guessing you may have meant to reply to the OP 'Just Tinka' ?
[s]Hmmm...[/s]
> I'll second pete_21's advice.
>
> Backup ALL your data - remember browser bookmarks,
> emails/contacts etc. along with the obvious docs, music, videos
> and photos.
>
> Then format the HDD and do a clean XP install followed by many
> hours of Windows Updates to get up straight...
>
> Then you just have to re-install all your applications and move
> your data back. But at the end of the day things will be nice and
> lively again :¬)
>
Had problems initially changing to Vista from XP, but all sorted and running 'sweet' now .....as long as it's Vista64 bit ... run Vista64 in Classic mode and 'chop' out all the 'chaff' ... then no probs, every application I need, even those built for W95 and W98 run quite happily with no objections:-)