Vista to XP. Will the drivers work?

[samcross]

So basically I'm trying to wipe my mum's laptop and start again with XP, mostly because Vista is painfully slow to use and isn't necessary for what she uses the computer for.

I've found the drivers for the WLAN/Audio etc. on the hard drive but I'm sceptical as to whether they'll work with XP. I've looked on the manufacturer's website (Packard Bell) and can't find the appropriate divers for the model (Easynote ARC21), and can't find them anywhere else on the internet for that matter.

So does anyone have an idea as to whether the drivers I found the HD will work on XP? Or can someone point towards somewhere I can acquire them?

Thanks.

[kalniel]

Very unlikely that the driver installer for Vista will also work for XP - sometimes you get them in the same package, but more often there is a separate one for Vista/7 compared to XP.

XP SP3 has a good chance of coming with some version drivers, and I think windows update should be able to pull down more recent ones that MS know about.

[samcross]

Very unlikely that the driver installer for Vista will also work for XP - sometimes you get them in the same package, but more often there is a separate one for Vista/7 compared to XP.

XP SP3 has a good chance of coming with some version drivers, and I think windows update should be able to pull down more recent ones that MS know about.

Yeah but I'm worried that I'll install XP and won't be able to use the Wifi at all, therefore won't be able to update.

[dangel]

Yeah but I'm worried that I'll install XP and won't be able to use the Wifi at all, therefore won't be able to update.

That's pretty normal for XP - it's dumb as rocks by comparison

Best thing to do is assemble a full set of drivers - you can't even assume it will find a wired LAN port by default in my experience. Plan for the worst case, XP usually rewards this approach.

Vista has a completely different driver model and so drivers are not compatible (in general). 7 shares the same model apart from WDDM 1.1 versus 1.0 and thus us very compatible with Vista drivers.

[scaryjim]

Could you upgrade to Win 7? More likely to have all the drivers.

Also, have you checked for any other model number than ARC21, since that product isn't shown on the PB website? Or is it similar enough to any other model that you can try using those drivers instead? Or failing that, can you find the manufacturer for each component and search their websites for drivers?

[Agent]

Could you upgrade to Win 7? More likely to have all the drivers.

I would also suggest this if you can. The difference between Windows 7 and Vista on my laptop is night and day. 7 is a million times more usable.

[dcwt2010]

I've never used Vista (jumped from XP and Win 7) but I was told that after all the SP releases it's now in a very usable form.

[GoNz0]

how much ram does the laptop have, usually they have less than recommended and run like crap.

[Behemoth]

I tried this on my grandfathers HP laptop just last week as his hard drive had failed and we hadn't made any recovery DVD's for his Vista. I had everything on his laptop working, Wifi, ethernet but could I get the chipset drivers to install ? No and it was sans GFX card driver aswell.

It seems the more recent HD Audio codec's by realtek aren't XP compatible, well not on laptops anyway, not sure about how this works on desktop motherboards though.

In the end after phoning him up he had two choices 1) He could buy a new laptop, bearing in mind he owed me for the cost of the parts I'd already coughed up for or 2) He could buy an OEM Windows 7 32 Bit and run with that.

He took the Windows 7 32 bit option, so I got that down for him and Windows 7 found everything the only thing I had to do was activate it.

Have to admit, with an extra gig of ram, bigger hdd Windows 7 has bought a new lease of life to that laptop

[chinny]

You could try looking for the drivers at http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/
You can search by PnP id on there.
At least it'll tell you if MS have signed drivers available for it....