C500T Series at Best Buy

I was able to buy this with 1 gig of ram and the T2080 processor for 450 dollars at Best Buy. I was going to get an Acer off of newegg for the same price, but it had a Celeron and only 512meg of ram. Anyway, I soon found out that they didn't have any in the store and needed to order it. The woman i was speaking with told me that it didn't come with any software (I took this to mean no OS), so I expressed my excitement at being able to install XP. As soon as she said that she corrected me and said that it still came with Vista though I would get no OS Disc and if I installed any other operating system it would void both Best Buy and Compaqs warranty. Can anyone confirm this? Also, I looked at the above sticky and while the dv series seems to have XP drivers, the C series doesn't. Does this mean I am stuck with Vista?

 

Installing XP will void the software warranty and it wont cover issues caused by XP. But your hardware warranty would still be valid. As for as installing Win XP you will have to find out the drivers since HP wont provide driver support for machines which came with Vista pre-installed. You will have to get the drivers on your own. Check out the V5000 series support page. Some of those drivers might work for the C500T series as well.

But do remember to burn the restore DVD before trying to install XP since that will help you get back to factory state if XP does not work out. Also in the event of an warranty issues you might have to put the system back to Vista.

 

Does XP offer driver support for the Intel 945GM motherboards or will I need to find those as well?

 

Yes, Intel should have the XP drivers for the 945GM. You may also need to slipstream SATA drivers into your XP disc since the laptop should be using ICH7 or 8 SATA controllers.