downgrade acer laptop to xp

[levemircento]

hello all
I have an acer 5335 laptop and I want to put Xp on it instead of its vista which I detest

I have a Xp disc and have read that I need sata drivers for the hard disk of which I have obtained, the problem is that the laptop doenst have a floppy drive and upon xp install it asks for additional drivers for sata etc [press f6 for 3rd party sata / raid etc] to be loaded from a floppy, I have tried to put them on a usb stick but I cant access that when asked for location of drivers

how can I get round this?

 

[custard]

tried assigning the USB stick and "A" drive letter?

edit: http://askville.amazon.com/make-usb-flash-drive-read-floppy-disk/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=10918337 ?

 

[levemircento]

ta, will have a look at that

 

[Eklipze3k]

Out of interest, have you tried letting the installation continue anyway? It might not need the drivers to be loaded. Worth a try if you haven't already.

 

[levemircento]

tried, failed


next!!

 

[levemircento]

Out of interest, have you tried letting the installation continue anyway? It might not need the drivers to be loaded. Worth a try if you haven't already.

it wont continue cos the xp disk doesnt have the sata drivers on it

 

[colin79666]

it wont continue cos the xp disk doesnt have the sata drivers on it

Use nLite to build your own XP install disk including the drivers. May as well include XP SP3 as well if your XP disk is older

http://www.nliteos.com/

 

[levemircento]

Use nLite to build your own XP install disk including the drivers. May as well include XP SP3 as well if your XP disk is older

http://www.nliteos.com/

have you used it? tips?

 

[colin79666]

have you used it? tips?

Yes I've used it may times before. Guide here: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Install-Windows-XP-On-SATA-Without-a-Floppy-F6-47807.shtml

 

[levemircento]

I have just found out that you can alter the hd type in the bios, I set it to ide and I am now able to install xp

thanks for helping

 

[colin79666]

I have just found out that you can alter the hd type in the bios, I set it to ide and I am now able to install xp

thanks for helping

You will probably lose some performance doing that.

 

[jenks69]

Once you've got XP on the laptop you can then download the drivers for the sata, install them then from the BIOS enable SATA again

 

[payney1]

Once you get it up and running take an image of the disk using a program like Acronis true image. This is something i have recently started to do, and it saved me hours of work, i just loaded Acronis and told it restore, pointed it to the image on the external drive and bob's your uncle.

I now do it with every laptop i do (family members)

 

[DaveMcT]

Could also try Ubuntu. Its solid, easy to use and easy to install.

 

[fingers99]

Or any Linux -- I'd vote for Kanotix or even Knoppix over Ubuntu. All will install from a live CD/DVD and can be updated or added to through the standard Debian repositories.

XP is getting very, very, old in the tooth nowadays.

 

[levemircento]

You will probably lose some performance doing that.

whats the difference performance wise whehter its set to ide or sata?


a couple of months on now from me downgrading to xp and its like a newer computer, everything is far zippier than when it had vista on

 

[fingers99]

It'll be faster still, but it's really only about disk write/reads. Mind you, XP uses paging, which I think is the equivalent of Linux swap, so it'll speed that up too, especially on memory hungry apps (not a lot, methinks, that isn't memory hungry in Windows!)

If the drivers are there, I'd do it.