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.
[...] failure. The system board actually died completely on me. I’ve got a new post up about how I set up my new VAIO with XP Pro. Posted by Andy Uncategorized Subscribe to RSS [...]
Hi there. I just got a Sony Vaio FW-170J yesterday and I’ve been trying to install XP. Do you know where I can find a driver to slipstream? I’d greatly appreciate it.
That’s the trickiest part (at least I thought it was). There are a couple of links in the body of the post above to places I found workable drivers for XP on the FW series model I have. Slipstreaming the install sounds like a great idea, but you’d want to be sure the drivers worked. Basically, I installed XP first, then sorted out which driver would get all the hardware to run. XP will at least support your keyboard, display and other core components, so the only must have is a driver for your network interface so you can get on the net to find the rest.
Good luck, you can do it
Thanks so much! TO THE PC!! I’ll let you know if/when I get it working. Thanks again!
Oh, don’t mean to bug but I actually meant the HDD driver. Whenever I got to install Windows XP it gives me a message saying that there is no Hard Disk. It won’t even give me the chance to install. Is that in the archive? Thanks again.
You’ll need chipset drivers – most likely it’s an Intel motherboard, and that’ll include whatever the drive controller chip is.
Woo hoo!! I finally got it to install! Thanks for your help man, I really appreciate it. All I need now is the proper intel graphics driver and I’m in business. Thanks again!
I just want to be clear on this post.
Are you saying that once you get this ACPI Uniprocessor that I my computer is getting ready to die and that I should get all my personal stuff off it before the computer dies completely?
Hi Crystal, while it would be impossible for me to be 100% sure my answer is yes. Get any important data, files & passwords backed up ASAP. I would of course recommend you do this regardless of whether your PC is showing signs of failure. My machine died quite literally without warning. By died, I mean it wouldn’t even POST so I could not access the BIOS, let alone load the operating system.
On the filp side, because it was the mainboard that failed I was able to recover data from my hard disk using another machine.