Compaq F500: Windows XP?

Hi all,

This is my first post here.
I have both searched the forum and tried Google before asking here and got no real answer, so here it goes.

I have read that some people (including at least one user from this forum) have successfully installed Win XP in a Compaq Presario F500, and I have considered doing this too.

My concern is that there must be very specific drivers for the F500 (as for most other notebooks) to handle, for instance, the dedicated keyboard keys for speaker volume up/dn, sleep, media control, etc. Since Compaq/HP will only distribute this notebook with Windows Vista, such drivers for XP very probably don't exist.

I have read of a possible work-around for this (try XP drivers for similar Compaq or HP notebooks), but has anyone succeeded in keeping full hardware functionality with those? Care to share which specific driver was used?

Thanks,
Bruno.

 

Here are the XP drivers for the Compaq F500 CTO (customized to order, i.e. purchased from hp.com) notebook: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?os=228&lc=en&cc=us&product=3316440&dlc=en
If you have localized model (i.e. purchased from a retail store), select the model from the column of them here: http://search.hp.com/query.html?lang=en&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&qt=f500&la=en&cc=us and then click on "Software & driver downloads" in the second column of the new page, then "Microsoft Windows XP" on the page after that. I've got XP drivers for my dv9700t for almost all the hardware; you shouldn't have any problems.

 

Thanks Strunni,
Will certainly take a good look at the links. Thanks for providing them.

All the best,
Bruno.