Downgrading (Upgrading) to WinXP on Compaq CQ50-110US (CQ50 family)
You can find a lot of the drivers for this variant of the CQ50 family online, but the wireless driver is the one that took me hours to find. Turns out that this laptop uses the Atheros AR5009 (also called Atheros 5009) wireless mini-pcie card.
I've collected all the drivers here to download: Compaq Presario CQ50-110US drivers. The drivers are in the order that I installed them, so you should probably try and do the same order if possible.
After all those drivers, everything on the laptop works in Windows XP. It's a lot faster than it was with Vista and with winxp it runs like butter. Everything works including: the card reader, the wifi (wireless), the blue/orange wireless toggle button, all the function keys, all the leds, the 3d video acceleration from the nvidia 8200M card, etc.
There's also some unused drivers that people on the net said worked for them but that I didn't need, as well as some other wireless drivers which were for the wrong card.
The installation order matters a lot I think for the Microsoft UAA driver, followed by the NVidia HDMI audio then the conexant audio and then the modem. That's steps 4-7 in the driver directory.
For the conexant audio and modem I know that you can't just simply run the setup program, you need to go through the device manager and do the "Have Disk" thing. For the video I think you need to do the same thing as well (step 2). Can't remember exactly, since I ended up doing so many variations until I go everything working, and then slept, then wrote this. But the drivers that I used are all there in order, so with some rejigging you will get it all going.
The HP Quicklaunch requires .NET 2.0 , the only reason I installed it in the end is because of the monitor vga display switch button (Fn + F4). Wasn't sure it would work without it since no dialog or text was displayed when you pressed it. But I didn't try hooking another screen to see if worked anyway. The software is pretty heavyweight for just that function. Good thing this notebook comes with 3GB of ram. Without this, most of the other buttons worked fine including audio volume.
The synaptics touchpad driver didn't seem necessary, it only added the vertical scroll ability. It's useful sometimes so I kept it.
Click to expand...
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
