So you've bought a new laptop or desktop that came pre-installed with Vista, played with it a little and decided that play time is over and it's time to get back to work. Of course the fastest way to do this would be to install your old faithful copy of XP on to your new machine. Your right but it's not that easy. After, finishing the "reload" you notice that things aren't quite right and that you have a lot of issues. These issues are probably driver related. I will try to address some if not all of these driver issues in this article. I will cover the following topics:
- Using device manager to determine device status
- How to have successful driver searches, including using the hardware identifier.
- How to install the different types of device drivers
- Solutions for unavailable drivers
When we're done we should have a clean install with a device manager free of yellow warning flags and a computer with complete functionality.
FIGURE 1
To check driver status after installing XP simply open up your control panel, choose the system icon and open up device manager. The devices with problems will appear with yellow question marks. See figure 1 as an example. In this example there are three obvious problems. The error we will fix first is caused by a missing video controller driver. For this article I am going to assume that you have already used and exhausted the computer manufacturers' website. If you haven't yet done so get your model number, serial number and if applicable service tag and go to your computer makers site. OK, when trying to find specific device drivers three pieces of information are particularly helpful; the first is the type of device, the second is the manufacturer and the third is the model number. The device manager has already told us that this is a video controller. The best way to get the other needed information is to run msinfo32.exe. Go to start -> run and enter msinfo32.exe. The msinfo display category will look similar to what is shown in Figure 2. Now Google "NVIDIA GeForce 7150M nForce 630M Driver download".
FIGURE 2
In this case, the driver id available and easily installed but what if the information available is not so clear. Let's look at our next example, the keyboard filter.
Here is a case where the msinfo32.exe is not very helpful. Instead the following information (device instance id):
{A87C2E0F-9A46-46B8-8EC4-E33355FBE1F7}KEYBOARDFILTER4&1F15100&0&01
It can be found under the properties tab of the device in question in the device manager. Another example of this is shown in FIGURE 3. Google "Keyboard_Filter_01 KeyboardFilter ", which is searching the description - Keyboard_Filter_01 and the hardware ID - KeyboardFilter.
FIGURE 3
The following search leads us to a HP forum which explains that the keyboard filter is an alias for the HP Quick Launch Buttons and points us towards the driver pack SP38341 which is downloaded and installed.
The final driver problem is the "Modem device on High Definition Audio Bus" device. The device information can be found in the properties dialog in the device manager. The details are shown in Figure 4.
FIGURE 4
A search on the vendor code tells us that this is a Conexant on board chip and a little more searching reveals that a XP driver was not released for the version number or the configuration used on my new Compaq laptop. We'll try to solve this problem by looking at the oldest laptop in the current Compaq series of my laptop and hope that a) It was delivered with XP and b) It used the same Conexant modem. We will be modifying older XP driver files to create ones that will work with your new hardware.
Replacement String:
HDAUDIOFUNC_02&VEN_14F1&DEV_5051&SUBSYS_103C30CF
FIGURE 5
The Softpaq pointed to is sp33742.exe, extract the files and modify the driver information file At8VEN5m.inf as shown in figure 6. Run the setup.exe file and luckily problem solved. I hope these examples help you if need to go back to XP on a newer PC
