The Downgrade Story

Hi, i thought i would share my experiance of trying to downgrade from Vista to XP, i have the VAIO FZ11L laptop and it's not that i hate Vista, its just i prefer XP, many of the programs i use run on XP (ZoneAlarm 6.5 etc) and although it does run good it just seems that in general XP runs faster, the only thing about it i like more than XP obviously is the graphics as many people will say, i've also heard that Vista uses more power than XP, my battery only lasts about an hour, maybe a little longer anyway so i wanted to test this theory as well.

If people have read my other post they will also know that i have a problem with a slow logon too wich is annoying, i still havnt got to the bottom of it but i think it may be one of the Vista updates, but since theres that many its almost impossible to find wich one.

So anyway i decide to downgrade but since the FZ11L has no floppy drive it would be impossible to load the sata drivers in the XP setup CD. So i decide to buy an external floppy drive wich should do the trick, i went to 3 diferent places looking for a floppy drive, finally found one in Comet, the only one wich was a SONY 2x speed one wich ment i'd have to get a load to buy it, acually it cost me £30 ($60) just for a floppy drive wich i wasnt happy about.

So i set it up with the laptop, banged the setup CD in and i was away, it loaded to drivers off the floppy and found the HDD, continuing with the installation it got to the 'crating list of files to be copied' just when its about to start copying the files for some stupid reason it has to load the sata drivers off the floppy drive again and i get the message "Please insert the floppy disc labeled 'Intel matrix storage manager driver' and press enter", i press enter and nothing happens, it doesnt even attempt to load off the floppy, i was almost freaking.

So i had a laptop with no OS on it and bought a floppy drive for nothing, i was determined to install XP, the only other option was to slipstream the sata drivers onto the CD, i already knew a program that did this - the most common one being nLite. Installing nLite on my PC only gave me some exeption error, again, i was at the edge of freaking out and decided to do it manually.

Following a walkthough i edited the XP files and added the driver then burned it to CD only to forget that i didnt make it a bootable CD, so i burned another copy this time with the boot files i downloaded off www.bootdisk.com, another failed attempt, i got the error 'Cannot boot from CD - Code 4'. I couldnt balieve this, after looking round the internet i found a program that acually extracts the boot files off the XP setup CD, it was called 'ISO Buster' so i done this and burned yet another copy... success! It finally booted! But the files i edited and added made no diference at all, it didnt find the HDD. All that damn messing for nothing!

A day goes by when i relised something... nLite uses .Net framework wich i didnt have installed. So im back on the net and downloaded and installed it and nLite worked! This time i wasnt building my hopes up, i added the drivers again and burned ANOTHER copy using nLite. Slapped the new copy in and waited, i didnt see it load the sata drivers at the bottom wich is why i was so shocked to see that it found the HDD! I could finally continue with the installation!

Installation took 20 - 25 minutes, i arrived at my new XP desktop. I couldnt balieve that all i went though just to get XP installed but i finally done it, it was so worth it... untill i tried to install the drivers and relised that they was only made for Vista! I couldnt find any drivers for XP, i looked for hours!

So im writing all this using IE7, windows Vista, with the slow logon, no ZoneAlarm and the short battry life. Oh well - i admit defeat... I think its rediculas that you spend alot of money on something and you cant have it the way you want it. They should make drivers compatible for all OS, not just the one your forced to use.

Hope you liked the miserable time i had installing XP, i had to tell someone about it cause it annoyed me so much , if anybody else has had trouble like this please post!

 

wow, reminds me of my own horror stories in install windows xp.

I am woundering now if it was a good a idea getting the new Sony Vista notebook if it will be this much trouble getting windows xp working.

Hmm have you tried the downgrade drivers here?

ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/pub/OS/XPDOWNGRADE/

Hopefully some downgrade drivers will be supplied for the SZ6 series as was done for the SZ5/SZ4

 

When you buy a computer from a major OEM you are not just buying hardware... you are buying the whole hardware/OS/driver/software experience as configured by the OEM. So from the OEMs standpoint, you trying to downgrade to XP is really an unintended use. And unsupported.

 

Thank a lot ^_^