Friday, September 26, 2008

Install XP on HP Compaq Presario V3619AU

There are many articles on installing XP on the HP/Compaq
laptops. The major problem seems to be the chipset,
graphics and sound card driver. Here are some good links
which works for our Presario V3619AU. YMMV.

General overview and dual boot.
http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista/558994-how-install-xp-after-vista.html
http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/installing-windows-xp-w-pre-existing-vista-on-hp-laptop/page/2

I used Vista's built-in Disk Manger to shrink the C: partition
and create another D: partition (the recovery partition will be
E: now. The I installed XP SP1 on the computer (better not
connect to Internet because of some bugs with XP SP1) and then
updated it to XP SP3. After that, we need to fight with various
driver issues.

Working drivers for chipsets and graphics.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=184457

I used the same Nvidia chipset driver and graphics driver
(NForce 630a+Gefore GO 6150 graphics) and it works for our
Compaq Presario 3619AU.

Nvidia Chipse driver
http://tinyurl.com/3ajgxy
Nvidia graphics driver
http://tinyurl.com//2q6ss4

Sound card was the worst for 3619AU (Connexant HD Audio). I
tried all kind of things to no avail. Finally got an Toshiba driver
and manually edited the INF file to get it working. Still it has
some bugs and occasionally noise comes out. Some people
have lucks with the HP Vista driver, not for us.

[EDIT in October 2008: finally solved the problem by using
the HP XP driver for other models but modifying the
INF files to add the IDs by copying the INF file
section from the Vista driver]

For most of the other things, HP/Compaq's Vista driver/software works
(wireless, card reader, bluetooth, DVD writer, etc). HP puts
the software in C:\SwSetup directory and that is a good thing.

For people who want a real XP based desktop/Notebook, the new
Atom based PCs will be a good option. For instance, I played
with Asus EEEbox and it was not slow at all running XP.

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