Installing XP

[TheMusicGeek]

Originally Posted by ddouglass

You have a problem. Dell does not have any drivers for XP for that laptop. The only thing they have are Vista 32 bit and Vista 64 bit. You are not going to be able to put XP on that laptop, because with no drivers then you don't have any way for XP to see the HD. I am afraid with that one you are stuck in Vista. From the looks of it this hard drive is a SATA drive.

True, that model was only sold with Vista but he may be able to get drivers from the component manufacturers. For example go to Intel for the Chipset and RAID driver, Creative Labs for the WebCam driver, etc.

Obviously I would try find ALL the drivers before you delete the existing partition.

BTW XP SP2 and above can see SATA drives with no additional driver support. The problem is the chipset access to the RAID array. It looks like that model uses the Intel ICH series storage manager which works with either XP or Vista.

[TheMusicGeek]

Another Idea for Vista users. Has anyone tried creating a XP virtual machine within Vista?

[JNS02]

Originally Posted by TheMusicGeek

Another Idea for Vista users. Has anyone tried creating a XP virtual machine within Vista?

Please, Tell me more

[TheMusicGeek]

Virtual PC is a program that will let you load an operating system from within Vista (or XP). I have used it many times for customers who have proprietary software from companies that are out of business or no longer support a particular product. The idea is to load the Virtual PC software then create a Virtual PC within it. You then start Virtual PC and load the operating system (you can have more than one). Once the OS is loaded you install and run what ever software you have. You will need a XP install disk with valid product key and the necessary XP drivers. Here is the link to the page where you can get more infomation and download the program: http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/pro...c/default.mspx

[JNS02]

I'll check into it, Thanks