How to downgrade VGN-UX390N from Vista to XP?

The VGN-UX390N comes with Vista Business and I hear that this entitles me to downgrade to XP Pro under the Microsoft Terms and Conditions - which i have started doing - my problem is how to get the many XP drivers I need.

The slightly older VGN-UX280P has very similar hardware and ran XP. But each time I try to install drivers from the old machine download driver page I get a message saying "this update is not intended for use with your computer model" and it stops. But when I try to run the newer Vista drivers for my machine it passes that point and then fails with various error messages like file not found (because these drivers are not for XP).

So the idiot drivers are checking the version of my machine somehow and this is death becuase i can't track down the drivers for most things at the harware manufactures web site.

Most critically I am stuck on the Alps Stick Pointing driver. Without that the windows diver highlighs things when I move around for no reason so I urgently need a driver for this. Does anyone have the VGN-UX280P and if so could they send me the pointing directory in their driver directory please.

Or any way to overide the dumb drivers and tell them not to check the model number? (command line?)

Any way to get Sony to help?

Any ideas please?

Thanks willyhoops

 

have you considered downloading drivers from Alps directly?

 

Of course - but there are no drivers at the Alps web site

 

Please note how to downgrade this machine including all the XP drivers has been solved and you can find it at this thread:

http://www.micropctalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2954