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the1paulcoleFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Installing Windows XP on a Sony Vaio VGN-UX1XN which has Vista on it, is this possible?

The reason I'm asking is because my boss wants to get rid of Vista on this portable PC and put XP on it. Having looked around, there are only Vista drivers available for this device. Can these be used instead of Vista drivers? Also, I assume, if I go down this route, I will need to boot from external floppy to load cd rom drivers, can i then use an external CD ROM to install windows? I've never done this type of device before!

Cheers

Paul
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vishal_impact
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HI
ok i think all you need is sony vaio driver disk which comes with the laptop when you purchase.
other is the xp professional disk and thats it you dont need to use floppy disk as nowadys all is loaded on cd so that should be fine .
make sure you can just load the xp disk straight into the drive and reboot the laptop and it should boot by the disk and your setup will start just folllow the setup procedure like we do on all other normal pcs .
let me know if you need to anything more
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Zeracles

And get the XP disk from here:
http://ibox.org.ua/84610
(just download & Burn it - it is SP3a included)
HI
i think this is not genuine XP as i can see the link is redirecting to some other private site i would strongly say to use genuine windows so please avoid this .
Sercondly Zeracles : you should know that it is illegal to use windows in this way.
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ASKER

Thanks for the replies. However, this is not a laptop. It's one of those small handheld pc's without any drives, just USB ports. I wasn't sure whether i could get the machine to boot from an external cd rom without some sort of driver being loaded first.
Use caution on this... downgrading to xp requires that you have XP version of drivers.

your original disc that comes with it probably (most of the time) has vista drivers because that is what it is bundled with.

My suggestion is to download and test xp drivers before proceeding with your downgrade.

1. go to your device manager and check your hardware list such as network, cam, modem, bluetooth, etc...

2. once you're done downloading them, download windows virtual PC. at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx

3. install xp on the virtual drive and install all drivers. check if there is any missing or non functioning hardware.

4. when everything is OK. its time for you to remove Vista once and for all. to do that, just reboot and install your GENUINE XP

goodluck.
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Mark Poirier
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Whoa !!   The "test" antontolentino describes is meaningless !!   Virtual PC emulates a PC with an Intel 440BX chipset, S3 Trio video card, Intel/DEC 21140 network card, and SoundBlaster 16 ISA PNP sound card.   Installing XP on a Virtual PC will easily work => but means NOTHING about whether or not you have drivers for your "real" PC !!

The VGN-UX1XN and similar handheld devices are very difficult to load XP on.   There ARE drivers for XP with the 945GMS chipset on Intel's website ... but without a bootable optical drive it is rather tricky to install XP.   You can do it by (a) formatting the hard drive and installing DOS [possible via a bootable USB key];  then copying the entire I386 folder from a Windows CD to the hard drive [do this with a bootable USB key that also has the entire I386 folder on it ... boot to it and copy the I386 folder];  and then booting to DOS and manually executing the 16-bit Windows installer (C:\I386\winnt.exe).   You'll then need to install any missing drivers => again you can use the USB key to get the drivers onto the unit.   The 945GMS drivers are easy ... get them directly from Intel ... but I have no idea what other drivers this unit may require ... and whether or not you could find XP versions of them.   [This could include the Bluetooth, wireless LAN, sound, ethernet adapter, camera, dedicated special feature buttons, etc.]

Needless to say ... proceed cautiously !!   I would as a minimum image the drive before starting so you had the ability to restore it should things go wrong.  [Again, you'd have to use a bootable USB key to do the imaging ... storing the image on an external USB device]

If the issue isn't a reliability issue ... but just a desire to have the XP interface ... then you could simply install XP in a virtual machine and run that "full screen" [4.5" isn't much of a "full" screen :-) ].   That is simple:   Install Virtual PC 2007;  copy an ISO image of the XP CD to the hard drive;  create a virtual PC; and then "Capture ISO Image" for the CD in the virtual machine ==> then just reboot the virtual PC (Action - Ctrl+Alt+Del  on the virtual PC menu => do NOT actually press Ctrl-Alt-Del).   XP will install easily in this case, since it "knows" about all of the emulated hardware.    Then you can run the virtual machine full screen ... and the device will "look" like it's running XP.   All basic functions will work fine (video, sound, internet, etc.) => but some of the special feature buttons won't work, since the "virtual" system won't know about them.

I think the best option is to switch Vista to "classic" menus and set its interface to look more like the XP interface that your boss likes.
All sorted! Thanks ever so much guys, it's been very useful.

XP went on very smoothly anyway, it was the drivers that I had more concerns with. But Sparkmaker provided the perfect solution and links. They all work fine for that model on this current one.

Thanks again. Keeps the boss sweet for a little while longer... :)