My boss wanted a new, lighter, faster laptop.
Hey, I can’t blame him! His was a few years old, not enough RAM for what he does and heavy to carry around. Compared to today’s notebooks, his old laptop was like carrying around a desktop computer.
He showed me specs on a Sony Vaio VGN-FZ460E and asked if it would do the job for voice dictation, viewing PACS images (he’s a radiologist) and the other dozen functions he needs to do while on the road. I noted that the thing was being sold with Vista and that he might want to ask if they had any flavor of XP, since that was compatible with our software in the Health System and that
They weren’t selling XP with this laptop.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “We can always pick up a copy of XP Professional and just wipe the drive. No problem.”
I lived to regret that promise! It was nowhere near as easy as I had supposed.
Well, eventually my boss found that the notebook was slow and sluggish. For a computer with 3 GB RAM and 2.1 GHz Core 2 Duo T8100 processors, this seemed very odd but I had already had experience with how much RAM Vista gobbles up. Even on a clean installation, you’ll only have about a half Gig of RAM free.
So, I took my boss’s licensed copy of XP Professional that he purchased over the Internet and grabbed the notebook and took them home for a quick, over-night formatting.
It took me at least 3 days.
Laugh if you will but Sony does not make XP drivers for any of the equipment online. Support told me that I would have to obtain the drivers from the component manufacturers.
The first night I partitioned the drive and tried to install XP for a dual boot. I failed pretty miserably.
The second day, I went and bought myself a USB floppy drive and some floppy disks since to add additional drivers you need a floppy disk.
Well, the first drivers to get were the
Okay, so I started Googling for alternate drivers and found a website. Unfortunately for me, Google informed me, “Your search - HTS542525K8SA00 xp drivers - did not match any documents.”
Not to be discouraged, I found the Open Drivers website.
I grabbed the hard drive drivers, floppy drive and my install disk and … the installation still didn’t work … so I took a break and played a game of Vector TD2. Sometimes I get ideas if I concentrate on something else other than the work.
About ten minutes into the game, I thought of looking for the drivers for the hard drive CONTROLLERS. Ah! My first good idea. I found the drive controller drivers Intel(R) 82801HEM/HBM SATA AHCI Controller Driver here.
NOW I was able to format the hard drive. It was about 12:45 AM by this time, so I turned in and let the install finish while I slept.
The next day was devoted to tracking down the drivers for the Ethernet adapter. Once I found those, I went to DriverAgent.com. I love these guys. They’re worth every penny.
I searched, downloaded and updated the drivers for every component on the notebook. The only one I couldn’t get to function was the driver for the on board camera. The driver for that would ONLY run in
I spent the last day setting up the laptop’s secure access for work, remote access to two 3D image manipulation platforms (complete with username and password instructions), the same version of Microsoft Office as work, Microsoft Access and the teaching file system that I had built so that he might keep an eye on what his students are doing at any time.
So, I learned my lesson. Even though I had rebuilt over a dozen computers over time, that did not mean that the next experience was going to be easy. I think it also means that Microsoft carries considerable clout for influencing manufacturers to not make XP drivers available for customers.
