ENVY on Windows XP 64bits ed.

Hello everyone,

As I have spent a couple days trying to get a smooth running XP-64bits HP Envy, I thought I'd start this thread in case anyone else like me needed to get this kind of setup. For my part, having an xp OS on my ENVY would allow me to run certain applications not supported under windows 7 so I gave it a go...

First of all, I have to note that my current system is still not quite functionnal: I am still missing drivers for the ATI 4830 and the intel 5100 wifi link. For some reason, the intel x64 driver installer quits silently without a crash or confirmation. The wifi link seems installed but it won't browse for available networks.

The ATI 4830 doesn't look like its gonna happen: I tried several versions of the ATI drivers, 8.7x, 9.11 and 10.2 without success. The drivers install but the video card is still showing up as vga display adapter in the hardware manager.
[EDIT] 8.672.1.2000-WinXP-2003-Vista-2008-7-AMD64-x86 is the only driver set found to be stable (altho not very fast, it IS working and stable) at this time.


- At this point the battery management doesnt show up in XP 64. Still looking for HP drivers I could use.
[EDIT] Windows XP management DOES take both batteries in charge (slice and 6 cells tested) Not the most efficient power management around but hey...


Things that work:

-Synaptics pointing device: used the original drivers for windows 7 they seem to support XP without problems. All functionalities are up and running (multitouch scroll, zoom, etc).
-Sound works with original HP driver as well.
-Atheros 8131 NIC works with drivers taken from the Atheros website.


That's it for now, will keep updating as I progress. Please fell free to share any info you have on this as it will benefit all of us. Thanks

 

Have you considered upgrading to Windows 7 Professional and use the Virtual XP Mode for it?

 

Yep, installed the xp mode and found out that xp mode uses terminal services to connect to the virtual machine. Terminal services are slower and also limit the color depth of the view to 16 or 24bits As I intend to do some dev+design stuff on it, thats not gonna do at all.

 

What development and design software doesn't work on Windows 7?

 

Flex Builder 3 plugin for eclipse... Multiple problems.
I also use a lot of photoshop (which work fine) but swapping back and forth between xp and 7 is a no go for me.

 

[03092010] updated with recent findings.

 

Have you tried virtualbox and vmware?

 

Yes. Better than Ms VirtualPC but still not quite like a real box.

 

I think the performance is almost native in those vm. You can enable multicore, 3D and Video acceleration and use native partition.

 

I'll have to see again about that and how it manages itself when running other virtual machines off of that first virtual machine...

 

Doesn't XP bottleneck the processor? I know dual cores perform very well in XP, but how is the performance of the quads?

 

Have not benchmarked anything so far but at least it reads all my RAM.

 

If its a 64 bit OS ram shouldn't be an issue. But I am really curious about how well the cores work. Vista and 7 were built with multiple cores in mind so I was just wondering how well XP can cope. It would really suck to lose performance on such an expensive laptop because of the OS.

 

WIndows has been built to handle multi-CPU since NT 3.5 or 4.0. VIsta and 7 were just built to take better advantage of them. XP will run perfectly fine with Multicore CPU's there was even a post SP3 patch to make XP work even more efficiently with them.

VIsta and 7 will just be MORE efficient with them then XP. But I think it takes like 8+ CPU's Cores to show any large difference.

 

Salut Tayeule, beau nick!

So to resume your observations, you are not satisfyed with the results of running Win XP on your ENVY 15 ?

Cuz I was juggling with the idea of running win XP 32bits (since I'll had to use the company ghost image) on a ENVY 15-1055SE and was wandering if I'll be facing major issues!? Other than not being able to use the full 6Gb of ram

*As you can see it's my first post/reply and I'm sory if I should have use a new topic...