Vista to XP: Recommended Load Order for OS/SP2, and Drivers?

This is related to my earlier thread here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=144892

After pulling my hair out until 2am last night I found a few posts recommending a particular order for loading the drivers. Hmmm . . . I never knew that was important. I've built a dozen or so desktops and never worried about driver loading order. Also, on Dell laptops I've never worried about it, either.

Anyway, here's the recommended order from another Acer post:

Chip
VGA
Audio
Touch
Modem
Lan
W-Lan
Cardbus
Bluetooth
Launchmanager

A few questions:

Chip: Is this the AMD driver for the AMD processor? What about the ATI Southbridge driver that was necessary to make the SM Bus controller (or something like that) clear up in Device Manager?

Touch - is this the touchpad?

Cardbus - is this the memory card reader?

Also, the OS: I know I load XP first but should I immediately load SP2 or load drivers prior to SP2?

Any comments are appreciated.

Keith

 

in random order, cardbus is the pcmcia driver, touch is the synaptics touchpad, yes.

the amd powernow and vga drivers are from AMD and ATi respectively. you can use the newer drivers from the ATI/AMD website for both, the powernow support allows XP to recognise the powersaving features on the CPU and use them properly.

i usually start with sp2 pre-loaded into the windows install, it saves about 3 hours and fiddling. plus with the slipstreaming of drivers and apps, well, about a full day saved just rebooting and installing.

from a default xp install, get the chipset, storage, vga and networking going first, and then install the majority of service packs. things like audio, bluetooth, wlan, lan, modem, cardreader, cardbus and the acer emanager/launchpad are trivial (until they are needed).

if you don't have sp2 in your copy of xp, (i.e. you bought it a while ago) sp2 is a monster download & install,
i'd recommend also getting the 200-300mb autopatcher xp pack once you've installed sp2 to get the pre-sp3 updates as it includes all the new windows software, wmp11, dx9.0c and ie7. i'd probably also install the google pack, if you want it.

lets see, drivers that XP doesn't recognise ... i usually get about 5-6. the more cryptic ones are fixed up once you get most of the drivers detected and installed.

in this case, the device "mass storage controller" is often the 4 in 1 card reader from texas intruments, "multimedia audio controller" being the audio chipset, and the "PCI modem", the winmodem next to the gigabit ethernet port.

i don't know what the difference is between the 3 modem packages on the acer euro ftp site, as with some of the packages, i haven't used the modem in a while.

you can use ati catalyst 7.7 drivers instead of the acer vga drivers, but you will also need to visit driverheaven to download the mobility modder so it can be installed (ie. laptops need specific OEM modification to install) the ati cat 7.7 package includes ati southbridge drivers, theoretically the ixp200 is still well supported by the catalyst packages.