Is "old" Win XP pro usable system for W170HR or P170HM?

Hello guys,
I'm going to buy one of these two laptops and on my old one I'm still using Win XP pro because from my perspective I can't see any reason why to learn a new system when the current one is OK for all my applications (and games).

Could somebody let me know if Win XP will be functional for these two laptops I'm currently deciding to buy? Thanks.

 

Yeah, agree that dual boot is better for older games than any emulator. Plus XP still feels much more ... controllable than 7.

The main issue could be ACPI in BIOS vs XP. There was one time I flashed my BIOS to a Vista/7 only, and XP would not install after that because of ACPI errors (BSOD). Then you'll have to get drivers for each little component - you probably won't find the hotkey drivers, which at best will result in problematic activation of wifi / bluetooth etc, at worst, these things won't work at all. Also, you need to see if you can navigate around Intel's site to get SATA drivers for the relevant chipset. Without that you can't slipstream the driver with nlite, and the BIOS won't allow you to alter the AHCI settings so XP won't even install.

 

These new machines are of course designed with Win7 in mind.
Drivers will be difficult if not impossible to find for full functionality with any other OS.
-

 

I thought there was a tiny limit on how much RAM you could use with XP?

 

No, a 10 year old OS will not run properly on these machines for a vast multitude of reasons, while you may be able to get it half functional it's going to be a terrible kludge and limit the overall ability of the machines. (drastically with the W170HR considering you need 7 for Optimus due to the way it works)

I won't get into the many detailed technical reasons but I will say this, if you're wanting to keep XP as your main OS then stay on older hardware, If you're wanting to step into the future then accept that software marches forward just as hardware tech does in a synergistic relationship that can only stretch so many generations apart.

 

Your drivers questions has been pretty much explained so i'll just say, I was reluctant to switch over to 7 as well when it first came out because of how bad Vista was. When I finally did I loved it, switched all my computers to 7 within a week.
There's really not much of a learning curve. If you're comfortable using XP now you do basically everything the same way except there are added features with 7. 7 is much faster then XP and much more reliable.

 

The typical XP version was the 32 bit one, which had an upper limit of 4GB addressable memory space. Video card memory and any other device that needed some would be removed from that before even addressing your RAM. A 1.5GB video card would leave you with at most 2.5GB of useable RAM.

Towards the end of the lifespan, the 64 bit version of XP was released, but it doesn't have very good driver support.

But as others have pointed out you'll have almost non-existent driver support for XP. Video card drivers for one just don't exist. Lots of others you'd be lucky to find XP drivers for as well.

 

I don't think it's as bad as you describe. If you successfully finish fiddling, XP should run perfectly fine (in my experience, even a few FPS faster). XP is old, but what does the shiny give you? DX11 which, imho, is a gimmick that decimates your FPS in exchange for barely noticeable dust/cloud effects. Optimus which doesn't do what it says on the box, as far as I'm concerned (to the point I'd rather not have it until it's 'fixed'). The only thing that tips the scales firmly against XP is driver support, mainly SATA (and BIOS).

My experiences with emulation are not that positive, and I admit I haven't tried recently. But the older games had good gameplay and poor visuals, whereas new games - in general - have good visuals and shallower gameplay. That's why I dual boot. I spend heaps of cash on a gaming notebook to be able to play any of my games on the go at any time, and I will only give up on that idea if it becomes impossible to install XP on a new notebook that I buy (ie non functioning wifi due to lack of drivers is still OK). Then I'll probably keep the XP notebook and travel around with that, and build a much cheaper gaming desktop for the next-gen games that I replay more rarely. Sorry for off topic...

 

You should be able to do xp64 on it or maybe xp32.
With xp32 you need to edit the boot.ini and add
/usepmtimer /3GB
As xp32 would use max 3gb ram this way only.

Xp64 should not be that great issue as it can go beyond 3GB, possibly up to 64gb ram don't quote me on this. Same boot.ini /usepmtimer helps for xp64.

As for how and drivers, get a copy of the Apple bootcamp for xp/xp64 and use those drivers or same ones from somewhere else for EUFI bios laptops.

This would include somewhere the eufi patch, Intel has the drivers you need, amd / nvidia has drivers as well, last time nvidia had only lower number version of drivers for xp but again you can use laptopvideo2go website or tweaksrus "tweakforce" to get past this and manually patch your drivers.

Wifi if intel then no issues, BigFoot might be a problem but you can get ?? other atheros or realtek wifi drivers for this, check on chipset used.

Audio creative or intel high definition audio drivers is available but you might need a patch for xp32 to get it fully working unless you have sp3/sp2 or somewhere there.

The rest is up to research, commonsense and some creative thinking and you can do it. I am sure there is a few hundred users that would love to upgrade to xp32/64 from win7.

Also note the fcc id's or part numbers in win7 device manager wifi properties tabs. Something like this HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_8384&DEV_7690&SUBSYS_102801CD&REV_1022\4&350F0B83&0&0001

Note the VEN = vendor number and DEV = device number, use this to search for similar hardware and tehir drivers, dell drivers is a great source for these. Not sure about the hard drive and bios, will try this on my Mac Book Pro Sept 2011 model and see how far I get and what I can rip from bootcamp.

nlite is your friend in this or f5 and usb drive with the drivers during install boot.

The only way is to list the hardware, search for drivers, I will help and see how far you get with this.

Edit: try a linux livecd/dvd and use the lspci and lsusb command in terminal / console dos box thingy and copy and paste itas this should be the easiest way to get detailed info of hardware and correct info.

 

Since some are so adamant about running XP, i'll do an experiment given my affinity for tinkering and driver modding, I'll see what it takes to get XP up and running on my NP8130 and post results/requisites for those interested, that sound fair enough?

While I might not agree with it being the best OS choice for myself everyone is entitled to their opinion on what works for them, this could also be helpful for those who must run XP.

EDIT: I have XP 64-bit up and running, it took alterations to the install and a modded by me video driver to pull off smoothly, also various updates had to be applied to get complete hardware functionality.

Ahci - Working
Lan - Working
Wlan - Working
Audio - Working
Video - Working / Modded driver (screen dimming and all functioning with injected OEM settings)
Touchpad - Working
Webcam - Working
FireWire - Working
USB 3.0 - Working
Fingerprint Reader - Working
Hotkey/Power Saver - Impossible to run on XP, even with modding the package. (Note that while the hotkey on screen display doesn't work the hotkeys themselves still function)

The only Clevo/Sager provided drivers ultimately used were for the touchpad mainly because I like the OEM settings used in that rev, some I injected into the XP install media for boot/install time detection, AHCI and chipset drivers etc.


Conclusion: You can get XP 64-bit running on these machines but it may not be for the faint of heart and you will have to sacrifice the hotkey OSD and power state changing, after that it's the feature differences between Windows versions.

As for 32-bit XP, I strongly suggest not even trying due to ram paging reasons, regardless what some may believe it really can only accept up to 4GB as your entire ram pool which vram and system paging will take a considerable chunk of.

If anyone has a desire to undertake this I'll post up a how-to with what drivers to use and recommended install media modding.

Posted from XP 64-bit.

 

Awesome! That is great What modding did the video need, and how did you get ahci for this chipset?

 

For the video I adapted the necessary id's and OEM settings over to the Nvidia desktop 285.38 XP driver, so far I only added my card (460M) to it but I can post it up here after adding 560M and 580M etc.
520M, 540M and 555M can be added too though they'll only be useful for CUDA.

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology F6 Driver Diskettes

You'll want to integrate those into the install disc in text mode with nLite, then it'll recognize the sata controller in ahci mode on setup as well as install the drivers to Windows during install.

I also highly recommend adding the Intel chipset drivers to the disc in PnP mode so the rest of the chipset gets set up during install, for that I used THIS revision.

For my disc I integrated LAN and WLAN drivers as well so it was ready to get online immediately after setup.

Another highly recommended step for saving time, hdd space and some headaches is to slipstream SP2 into your XP 64 disc, along with various updates SP2 also comes with the UAA bus update needed to get sound functional.

EDIT: Added all current Clevo Nvidia GPU's to the modded inf, file attached.

Drop nv4_disp.inf in the Display.Driver folder of the 285.38 Nvidia XP 64 desktop driver package.

 

Wow, I am still amazed that unless you need xp for proprietary programs, you would want to run it vs 7. I do have a dual boot for work, for proprietary reasons, but 7 is a vast improvement over xp. (disclaimer: this is true on computers made in the last few years. If your on a 4-8 year old computer, disregard).

 

And XP 64-bit, no less, which is probably the least-supported Microsoft operating system since ME.

 

I agree with you as 7 is my preferred OS and has been since it's introduction, and I'm right back to my 7, (used a second HDD for the XP experiment) XP installing was just a fun nostalgic tinkering experiment for me that I had a little free time to do and it may be helpful to die hard XP users whom I'm sure will switch to 7 or 8 when they're ready/able.

Thats a bit outdated mentality, XP 64-bit is the workstation version of Server 2003 64-bit, IE the same codebase and build number and kernel version, NT 5.2 build 3790, (XP 32-bit is NT 5.1 build 2600) they get the exact same updates at the same time.

The whole unsupported argument I'm pretty sure stems from the fact that at the time of it's release back when there wasn't much in the way of consumer drivers and software immediately available for it but that really has been a nonexistant issue now for some time, even obscure hardware seems to have XP 64-bit drivers.

As for software incompatibility the only thing i've seen not run on the 64-bit version would be 16-bit ancient commandline apps which you'll find support has been removed from Windows after they went 64-bit anyways, you're also better off running those sorts of apps in a dos emulator or vm anyway.

I'll reiterate why I proposed going XP 64 if you had to use XP rather than classic 32-bit, the biggest reason is the max memory pool size, remember that 32-bit is 2^32 maximum address storage coming to 4294967296 bytes (4 GB) and no PAE does not get around this, PAE is for paging over 2GB of memory per process within the pool, and after your vram and system processes are paged you're left with a very small amount of ram to actually work with, my rough estimate for my system would be around 2GB of actual usable ram, thats accounting for the 1.5GB vram paged and OS overhead.

64-bit is 2^64 coming to 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes which comes to 17,179,869,184 GB or 16,777,216 TB. Just for some informative perspective.

 

Awesome! Did the win 7 lan drivers work or did you use XP ones 'borrowed' from a D901/M570/whatever machine had the same component?

 

Grab the JMicron LAN drivers from their ftp or station-drivers.com, the package includes win2k/xp/xp-64/vista-32/vista64/7-32/7-64 drivers.

 

Thanks again. Any chance I could trouble you one last time? How do you mod a 580m driver for 32 bit? (I just realized that 32 is my last unactivated XP left). I presume that an older driver would actually work (unified drivers, and all that), but you just mod the latest one to squeeze the maximum FPS out of it?

 

Heres an inf for ForceWare 285.58 for XP 32-bit.

 

Atmosk ... you are my new hero. I've ordered a P170 and if I'll use your inf, and nlite the chipset and SATA drivers in. If 32 bit XP actually works - ie I can have both my old classic games and BF3 on it (dual boot with 7 Home Premium 64), I swear I'm going to have your avatar etched onto the cover of the machine in homage For anyone else interested in older games I'll necro this thread in a few weeks to report any glitches or issues (both with the system and the old games) once I've had some time to test a them out more than superficially.

 

To save yourself some time, I'd consider trying a Virtual Machine or XP mode (if you are able to get a copy of Win7 Professional or better) before going with the dual boot. I run most of my older games in a virtual machine and they don't have any issues. Really old non-3d games work almost guaranteed, while newer games depend entirely on the minimum requirements.

 

Yeah, I got Win 7 with my W870CU and found I couldn't run a whole load of stuff in XP mode. Or it ran, but with one patch and not another. Or it ran but crashed from time to time. So I got a D900F after a short time and went dual boot. I thought that would be the last machine I could get away with doing that. To be honest, getting XP on the P170 I just ordered would be a fun learning experience (I'm confident it can be done with full stability). Whereas sitting with XP mode and just going trial and error with various patches, possibly writing off games again ... I'm not so sure about.

 

Actually, I have done something similar; got a dual-boot config up and running in my Sager 8170. Some of the drivers for Windows 7 could work on Windows XP as well.

So far, only the THX, fingerprint and Hotkey do not work on Windows XP.

 

Well, it does all work minus a few little things. All the old games that had trouble running under 7 work. Plus all the games I got this year work.

As Darkarn said, the hotkey interface doesn't work, but the keys do actually do what it says on the tin, so no functionality is lost.

@ Darkarn - how did you get it run the interruptible power service? I get the 2481 error so can't go into standby?

@ Atmost - any idea why your nvidia driver doesn't sticky a second display (it reverts to notebook screen whenever you reboot)?

 

do u have the modded inf file for the 290.53 please thank you

 

hi I was wondering if you can please help me I followed your instructions on how to install xp 64 bit but the only problem is that my wlan driver is not working can you please help me with this I have the 1102 killer bigfoot network card

 

Click on the link in my signature and follow the directions to navigate the website I link to there. When you get to the Atheros AR5001X, etc, section, they have a set of drivers that's XP compatible. The actual Bigfoot software won't work, but the hardware itself will. You should be able to connect to your home network just like any other wireless adapter.

 

thank you very much for helping me with this your steps worked one more question how did you know that you had to use these drivers I was just wondering?

 

All Bigfoot cards are built on well known Atheros chipsets. The standard Atheros drivers will work- but you lose out on the software that makes the Bigfoot Killer cards perform so well in benchmarking.

 

I may have a lead to drivers for the fingerprint reader under XP. If the reader is made by Upek (which has since been bought by Authentec) there are probably compatible XP drivers out there.

My current (4 year old) Acer Travelmate 6592 has such a reader and was shipped with XP Pro 32 bits. (I've been running 7 since release, skipped Vista altogether.)

Install an XP compatible version of Protector Suite and you should be good to go.

Regards,

Darkshado