Installing XP on My Compaq Laptop

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HoldenFan94

New user

2 posts
Posted: 08/08/2012 10:08 AM

Hi,

I have a compaq persario caq4-195tx that came with windows 7 but i want to use windows xp on it.

I put the disc into my laptop and got up to WINDOWS IS STARTING and then it crashed!

it has a 500gb hdd, 2gb ram, 512 ati Radeon HD 5430

please help

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Aberfoyle Park PC Repairs

New user

2 posts
Posted: 05/05/2013 1:05 PM

The best course of action to take in downgrading a system is to manually check the manufacturers support websites for their separate driver downloads to find XP compatible drivers.

If your laptop came with Windows 7 it's not very likely that the Compaq website will have XP drivers available.

Boot your computer from your Windows XP Installation CD and delete all of the available partitions on the hard drive , then format it so you have a clean installation of XP. In most cases this also means removing the in-built recovery partition (I've seen this cause problems during installation if you don't delete it)

After the install is complete , look in device manager for any devices with a yellow "!" - these are the ones you need to manually hunt down on Google.

For example , go to the ATI (AMD) website to get the latest XP driver for your HD 5430 , the Intel Support center to get Chipset drivers, etc

If there are any drivers that you can't find , view the properties in device manager and look up the "Hardware ID" - this will contain a VEN (Vendor) Code and a DEV (Device) code (And sometimes a SUBSYS code too) , which you can then google to try and identify which hardware you need a driver for. it will look something like VEN_8086_DEV_1503_SUBSYS_12345 - You can then put this into Google and it will tell you the name for the hardware so you can go to the manufacturers site to get all the drivers you need.

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