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October 5th, 2008

Asus F7sr downgrade vista to XP

I downgraded an Asus F7sr laptop from Vista home premium to XP home.

As mentioned in a prior post, I had some problems installing XP (until I upgraded the BIOS, so that I could run the hard drive in ATA mode).

Installing the device drivers was more difficult than I had hoped.

I use microsoft updates to install a few drivers (but not many).

Looking at the Asus website, I find NO XP drivers (I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, the F7sr never had XP as an OS option).

I use the universal drivers from driverpacks.net, and I manage to install about 4 drivers (that leaves 5 unknown drivers).

Next, I use the Vista drivers CD that came with the laptop.

Wow, some driver folders actually contain drivers for both Vista and XP (even though the CD has “Vista drivers only” printed on it!).

OK, that takes care of a few more drivers.

I’m eventually left with unknown drivers for sound and dialup modem.

I download the modem driver from a similar Asus laptop (which does have an XP option).

And I finally get the sound driver working by searching the Vista driver CD, and running the setup program (which warns me about vista drivers not working on XP… but they end up working anyway!)

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Posted by Computer Help in Technical

3 Comments »

3 Responses to “Asus F7sr downgrade vista to XP”

  1. The Hawg says:

    That’s exactly the problem we had when we downgraded my laptop at work from Vista to XP — finding the drivers was difficult.

    It seems a lot of manufacturers have gone to supporting Vista only. Still, our clever tech guy was able to find a number of drivers and workarounds (my sound card utility and driver, for example, are both in Spanish).

    I do hate that Vista stuff. I’ll be forced to convert one day, however.

    October 6th, 2008 at 16:11
  2. Robin says:

    It must be awful using Windoze machines – I feel very sorry for you.

    Do you suggest to your poor customers that they get Macs? I suppose constantly fixing something that is so badly designed keeps you in work. I don’t know how you can look at it though – the OS is so UGLY.

    October 8th, 2008 at 9:07
  3. Computer Help says:

    Hi Robin.

    You will find I’m a rare breed of tech: I’m an OS agnostic (and browser agnostic too!).

    I think what you are trying to say is that the GUI is ugly.

    Very few people (myself included) get to see what the OS (ie the code) actually looks like, let alone gaining enough expertise in both windows and MAC/Linux, such that you can make an educated conclusion about the OS “uglyness”.

    As far as the ugly GUI: after 20+ years experience (including DOS prompts and unix shells), I find that all GUIs look so similar, that any real difference is just cosmetic, and limited to “eye candy”.

    From experience: If you really want to use an OS as quickly and efficiently as possible, then your only real option is to use the command line prompt.

    Using a mouse and clicking on buttons and scrollbars, etc, make you at least twice as slow as doing the equivalent task using a command prompt (or at least keyboard shortcuts). Mice and GUIs need much less training, which is why the vast majority of people use mice and GUIs.

    October 8th, 2008 at 22:53

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