Windows XP Pro on Sony Vaio FW series

New laptop time – this time around it’s a shiny Sony Vaio VGN-FW48E. Sony were kind/vindictive enough to pre-install the machine with Windows Vista which was no good to me as I actually want to do some stuff with the machine, not sit looking at a boot up logo all day or wait 15 minutes to find a file. So I installed XP Pro. And you can too.

Firstly (this is more for the event the laptop ends up going to someone else) I ran the create recovery media wizard so it can if needs be get back to it’s factory installed state. You ought to do this too just in case.

Second, completely wiped the harddisk by deleting all the partitions, creating a new one and formatting. Quickest way to accomplish this is with a good boot disc – I used the Ultimate Boot CD for this.

First problem – XP isn’t going to recognise the hard disk controller as it’s not in it’s driver section. You could go for the F6 option during the XP install and load the drivers from a floppy disc, but of course this machine doesn’t have a floppy and I’m not about to buy a piece of 90’s hardware to fix this 2010 machine. Find your driver then slipstream your XP installation disc using nLite. It’s not nearly as hard as it sounds, and nLite is a free download. You’ll just need access to a machine running Windows, your Windows Disc, a copy of your Drive Controller Driver and a blank CD.

Then you can install XP. On a side note, I installed XP Pro using OEM media, but the license key from my old VAIO that this one replaced. Didn’t seem to cause any issue at all, and activated online without a hitch. Once you’re up & running you’ll need to find drivers for all the hardware so you end up with a device manager that looks like mine does:

Everything as it should be. Wireless networking, ethernet, bluetooth, camera, media keys, card reader etc all functioning. It’s a pig of a job to find drivers that will work though, so be warned. Here are some links that may, or may not help:

Modding ATI Catalyst. Basically, you probably won’t get the right driver from ATI for a laptop – they will tell you to go to your Laptop Manufacturer (Sony in my case). Sony haven’t made an XP driver for any of my hardware as they don’t support it, so modding the Catalyst is the only option. It works and it’s free.

Sony Vaio FTP Driver Archive. Basically, Sony may not have written XP drivers for my machine, but they have for plenty of others and the hardware in them is all the same stuff. I just used drivers from similar models.

HP (for the Ricoh Card Reader) This was the last one I had trouble locating. In device manager it was simply listed as “Base System Device” so finding out what it actually was was the first trick before I could start trying to find a driver.

There are other places on the web purporting to have XP drivers for Sony VAIOs, but treat them with caution and virus scan anything and everything you download.

Good luck.