A friend of mine was having problems with Word 2007. Every time he'd try to save a document, the application would not respond anymore. Repairing and reinstalling Office 2007 Pro didn't help either so I concluded that there must be some conflict with the OS or other application. We decided to reformat the laptop, just this time not installing the Vista Recovery CD, but rather XP.
The main reason I downgraded the laptop to XP was because the brand new Acer Aspire 5920G was running sluggish and that Word 2007 refused to cooperate with Vista or something like that, here are the rough system specs:
Core 2 T5250 @ 1.5GHz on an Intel 965P chipset
2GB DDR667 RAM
120GB HDD SATA (i think it was at 5,400 rpm, if not then at 4,200 rpm)
and a wheezing new Nvidia geforce 8600M GT w/ 512MB VRAM
Realtek HD Audio
Still running vista, the task manager revealed that the available RAM was "24". The total was something like "2000" and cached was around 1000. I assume the units are in MB. The page file size was way up at 1GB which was 50% of the maximum size. After booting up, 84 process are reported running. At some point too, mmc.exe (which is some management control process) was consuming 100% CPU time which I found hard to justify for the 5 minutes it lasted.
Onto the actual downgrading procedure:
After backing up the Favorites and Documents I shutdown the laptop, went into the BIOS and made sure the DVD drive was listed above the HD in the boot devices. I then inserted the XP Pro CD and restarted the computer.
After Windows Setup loaded all the drivers, I chose the first option in the menu to install windows but instead of being presented with the license agreement, I got an error message stating that no hard drives had been detected and that windows setup was unable to continue.
A little online research with another laptop yielded promising results: the hard drive was not detected because the windows xp setup does not include SATA drivers. The laptop runs a 120GB SATA HD and so the HD was not detected by windows setup. If it had been an IDE HD like in my laptop I would have not had any problems. Now how was I going to feed windows setup this SATA driver? Simple, copy the driver onto a floppy, start windows setup again and hit F6 when asked if you'd like to install additional Third Party Drivers. Sounds simple right? Well considering the fact that 99% of laptops sold don't come with a floppy driver and that I didn't feel like dishing out $30 for the only USB Floppy Disk Driver from Sony available in my area (I don't even know if that would have been recognized by windows setup as A
, I had to fine another solution. And I did at Softpedia.com:
Install Windows XP on a SATA Hard disk without a Floppy
I downloaded a freeware application called
nLite which has the ability to tweak your windows setup, in this case add support for SATA hard drives. In order to include this SATA driver, it is necessary to have the drivers from your laptop manufacturer. I was able to download the SATA drivers for the Aspire 5920G from Acer's website (the drivers were described to work with Vista but heck, they worked ^^).
After burning my tweaked version of XP Pro, things went much better. I deleted all 4 HD partitions that came preinstalled and made way for just one new one. From there I was able to setup windows just like with any other computer. One thing that did surprise me was that I was able to set the resolution to 1280x800 without proper graphics card drivers, that wasn't possible with my Acer laptop...
Now comes the fun part *cough* ...finding XP drivers for a laptop that comes preinstalled with Vista and that has a support page with Vista drivers only. Here's the current status:
- WLAN drivers: I downloaded the standard Intel 3945ABG drivers for XP from intel's website.
- Chipset driver: Downloaded the Vista chipset drivers from Acer's website, and just like the SATA drivers, they were also compatible with XP!
- Graphics Card drivers: This one was a bit tricky to figure out at first. I ended up downloading the Forceware X v156.10 XP 32bit driver, opening the device manager, locating the GFX card entry, updating the drivers and manually locating the inf file from the downloaded driver.
- Integrated Webcam driver: Not necessary, automatically installed by XP and it works fine from My Computer.
- LAN driver: To date I haven't found any working ones, upon loading the inf file and choosing one of the many entries I get a device error stating that "The device could not start" because it was not compatible with the installed drivers.
- Sound driver: Here again, I haven't been able to get the sound working, after trying to install one of the Realtek drivers, nothing happens, when opening the Volume Control it says that no device is found. Lucky for my friend, he has a USB Headset with it's own soundcard, but it's still irritating to not have the laptop's sound card working.
With the majority of drivers installed, I noticed a very noticeable increase in system performance ranging from start up speed to running applications. There was also much more RAM available (out of 2GB, about 1.7GB was available) with only 20 processes running. Yes I had to download and install 83 security updates, WMP 11 and IE7, but that didn't matter that much to me; as long as good ol' XP runs, I'm happy.
I hope that with this report, I'm able to help out other people who are having similar problems trying to downgrade to XP or who would like to do so.
If you have any questions or doubts about downgrading to XP or are not sure if you should do it or not, then feel free to start a new thread in the "Microsoft Windows" section of NerdHelp.
greetz brimu
Downgrading from Vista to XP Pro on an Acer Aspire 5920G
Linear Mode
