Windows Vista to Windows XP Downgrade Driver Woes

Raj Perumal — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 21:44:50 +0000

I have run into a few people who needed/wanted to downgrade to XP from Vista which came with their laptops when they bought them. There are a lot of good deals to be had with laptops in the big box electronic stores and they all come with Vista pre-installed. In order to downgrade you need to first create recovery CDs so you can re-install Vista later if you ever decide to go back to it. Then you need to use oem XP media to downgrade your license and call Microsoft to activate XP. Of course after doing all of this you might run into some driver issues….

I recently ran into this problem with the HP Pavilion dv6898ca notebook. On the bottom of the notebook it is also referred to as the HP Pavilion dv6700. However I found out that it’s exact model name is the HP Pavilion dv6898ca. I was able to downgrade the OS, and even found most of the drivers online at HP’s web site. But unfortunately the wired network card driver for the Realtek RTL8101 NIC, the video card driver for the Nvidia Geforce 8400M GS video card and the modem driver for the Motorola SM56 soft modem were missing from the HP web site. I was able to get the modem to work by using the Vista driver provided on HP’s website. But there was no luck with the network card driver or video card driver.

I contacted HP technical support and they were able to provide me with the XP network card driver link at ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp38001-38500/sp38329.exe. However they couldn’t find a driver for the Nvidia Geforce 8400M GS video card that came with the notebook. I was finally able to get it to work here with the driver from this link: http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/GRAPHICS-BOARD/NVIDIA/NVIDIA-32bit-ForceWare-GeForce-Go-15655.shtml.

I hope this helps out you folks trying to do the downgrade. The moral of the story is to contact the vendor if you are trying to find drivers for a notebook, and if you still can’t find them, Google is your friend!

-RP

Vista to XP Downgrade on Laptops with No Floppy Drive

Raj Perumal — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:07:47 +0000

For those of you that don’t know, Microsoft provides the ability to legally downgrade your copy of Vista to Windows XP if it’s Vista Home Premium or higher on your laptop. The only requirement is that you have a copy of an XP CD to do this.

However most new laptops have SATA hard drives in them and you cannot access them during the Windows XP Installation sequence. When you try and specify a driver by pressing F6 it automatically asks you to insert a disk in your floppy drive and obviously that is not an option unless you have a portable floppy drive.

Don’t fret, there is an easy solution. There is a program called Nlite that is free to use and allows you to create a bootable XP cd from existing media. What it will do is allow you to integrate the SATA drivers into the installation CD so you have no need to hit the F6 key for the floppy drivers.

You can also integrate service packs and set other options with the program. Goodbye floppy!

-RP

The musings of an IT Consultant » Vista downgrade

Windows Vista to Windows XP Downgrade Driver Woes

Vista to XP Downgrade on Laptops with No Floppy Drive