Metropol

Nini wrote:Oh wow! Is that background from The Lion King? Guess you can't even be right when picking desktops.

Chie wrote:Who are you taking the piss out of now, me or him?

Gavin Scott wrote:As I've said in other threads, I'm back with XP and it runs like an absolute dream. Laptop goes like the blue blazes, and SP3 has made it even more stable.

I'm procuring some Vaio laptops for the office at the moment, and we're all agreed that we don't want Vista. Almost impossible to find a Sony without it now (certainly not the models of laptop we want), so we're going to have to downgrade.

Just to drag this even more off topic - can anyone suggest a solution to hardware driver issues when doing this? Our IT firm (outgoing, I might add) managed to screw up the sound card drivers for the boss's desktop vaio last year, and she went out and bought herself an external creative USB2 dealy - but its not exactly aesthetically pleasing on the desk.

The Sony Centre tell us that we will have problems finding XP compatible drivers is we choose to downgrade - but I can hardly believe this is insurmountable given the components in the pcs are bound to be at least a year or two old by design.

Any thoughts?

Dr Lobster* wrote:

Gavin Scott wrote:As I've said in other threads, I'm back with XP and it runs like an absolute dream. Laptop goes like the blue blazes, and SP3 has made it even more stable.

I'm procuring some Vaio laptops for the office at the moment, and we're all agreed that we don't want Vista. Almost impossible to find a Sony without it now (certainly not the models of laptop we want), so we're going to have to downgrade.

Just to drag this even more off topic - can anyone suggest a solution to hardware driver issues when doing this? Our IT firm (outgoing, I might add) managed to screw up the sound card drivers for the boss's desktop vaio last year, and she went out and bought herself an external creative USB2 dealy - but its not exactly aesthetically pleasing on the desk.

The Sony Centre tell us that we will have problems finding XP compatible drivers if we choose to downgrade - but I can hardly believe this is insurmountable given the components in the pcs are bound to be at least a year or two old by design.

Any thoughts?

i would say that there will almost certainly be a generic driver available for the onboard audio, nearly all laptops use standard chipsets like realtek or intel hd.

the trick is trying to identify the device - what does device manager show you? rather than go to the sony site, you can go direct to the chipset manufacturer and download a 'generic' driver for it. sometimes it takes a bit of investigation (and delving into the .inf file to discover the true manufacturer) - on some Acer laptops i've worked with, it will show the wireless lan card as 'Acer Wireless Connection' or something but the .inf file which goes with the driver has all the registry keys and information to indicate that the wireless chipset is in fact manufactured by atheros.

if you've got the vista drivers on cd or downloaded somewhere, or if they are available for download from the web directly, let me have the link and i'll do some digging for you.