Problems with XP install on dv6000t?

I recently ordered a dv6000t that came pre-installed with Windows Vista. Though I haven't gotten it yet, I've already decided I'm going to trash that Vista crap and install XP Pro. I've looked through the forums and read about all the problems involved with downgrading to XP over Vista. My question is... Is it really that much of a pain? If I were to burn all the drivers on the HP site here:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?os=228&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=1842155&lang=en

and be sure not to delete my QuickPlay partition, should I have that many problems?

 

Amazing enough I did just that yesterday. I have a Gateway MT6821 that came preloaded with vista in the beginning of feb. (right after the vista release) I really didnt like vista then and I still dont. They are starting to get a handle on some things but most of the programs I run have some kind of compatibility issue or another.

Moving on: the reason it took me so lomg to roll back to XP was because my laptop doesnt have a floppy drive. And my SATA drivers need to be loaded into the system via a F6 third party driver install with a floppy. I did alot of research and I heard alot of ideas for doing this without a floppy, from using a USB flash drive (which doesn't work) has to be floppy w/ F6, to slipstreaming the SATA controller right into the copy of windows xp and doing a unattended command prompt install or a sysprep install. (sort of difficult even with research and 5-6 wasted CD's later) The best thing to do if you run into this sort of problem with the sata thing is: download a program called... nlite ...it is used to intigrate the drivers (and other things if you wish)right into your WinXP copy and it will also make a bootable .iso for install and you can bypass the F6 third party install all together. (if you tried to install and had this conflict, XP setup will say it can't find any hard disks) Try to make the .iso on a computer that has a floppy that way it is easier to turn the manufactuers sata driver files into the raw .inf files that nlite needs for integration. (the files will be either an setup .exe or a floppy image from the manufactuers website for your sata controller) Download the floppy image and put it on a floppy then you can access and copy the files from exploring the floppy drive in my computer) If you use the setup .exe files instead you will have to first extract them from the setup.exe with command prompt.

All in all this is the only real difficult part of a new XP install where vista used to be. (and format that recovery drive you wont need that anymore, if you wanna go back just use you recovery cd) And if you found all this to be pretty clear you will know how to do this if it happens to you. Oh another thing you can do is buy a USB floppy drive which are around $20 plus. (a reg floppy you can get these days for $3. I found that mark-up to look like a rip off so i took a slightly longer road.

Good luck!

 

If your system shipped with Vista, then you wont have any Quickplay partition. HP used a different version of Quickplay with XP(version 2.1/2.3) and they updated to version 3.0 for Vista which doesnt include the directplay(bootable part) on a separate partition. So, if you want to use Quickplay after rolling back to XP, you will have to download the quickplay software and create the partition during XP install.

 

I have a v6000t. I download the drivers including SATA, used nlite to slipstream em in, and then installed XP Pro. Went perfectly.

(no quickplay)

PM if you need more info.

 

Hey, what about the drivers? I have a difficult time trying to get some drivers... the cam didnt work... I believed it was the only driver that it was giving me a hard time!!! I dont mind the SATA drivers... why are they that important? NFTS isnt that bad... or is just preference??? confuse... but honestly... who do you guys get the webcam working? I selected this option because all my friends are around the world... and my family... so the webcam is really important for me...

So, how do you guys get all the drivers for your DV6000T???

 

SATA and NTFS aren't really related. You can use SATA or not - your call.
SATA is said to be slighly better drive perforance.

The webcam drivers are probably on HP's site, but i dont have a cam.

 

There is no significance in using the SATA driver upfront on installation. You can install the driver later once XP is up and running and it will benefit from the extra performance just fine. XP & Vista load I/O drivers that interact directly with the hardware and do not depend on BIOS for that. That is of course all true if you can phsychologically cross the barrier of having the BIOS option left to non-SATA in the first place ;-)

 

I'd agree but..

In my case, (v600t) if I installed XP with SATA switched off in the bios, I couldn't later install SATA and then turn it on in the bios. If I did, BSOD crash. Slipstreaming worked perfectly.

Not sure why.

 

Sure its true that you can't enable it later. The thing is that you don't need to as that flag doent change anything for XP (or vista) once they start booting and load their own drivers alltogether.

Edit: the case where it would be important to load the sata driver upfront would be for example on the dv9000 in case you had 2 drives and you wanted to set up a type of RAID configuration before XP even starts.

 

I reckon you should try Vista for a while and see what you think of it.