If you have reached my post obviously you have tried to install win xp on your compaq laptop cq40 but you must have reached the point where it blanks out or rather blues out into that famous blue screen. I'm not going to ask why you want to downgrade to xp you obviously have your own reasons.
Lets look at the list of things you are likely to need.
1. Laptop
2. WinXp Installation Disk (with SP2 or SP3 integrated)
3. Another desktop or laptop computer with an active internet connection and a CD or DVD Writer
4. A lot of patience...
First you will have to integrate the necessary drivers into your xp installation cd, the best way u can do this is by using a software called 'nlite' download the software from the net, before you install it make sure u have dotnet installed on your computer, if you don't go to the microsoft website, download and install it.
The next step is to integrate the sata drivers into your windows xp installation cd, now you will be thinking, how the hell do i do that, you cannot copy and paste it on to your cd obviously and i don't plan to cover integrating drivers in this post. Do a google search and find out how to integrate sata drivers onto your installation disk using nlite...
After u feel confident enough of venturing into this you will have to find the relevant SATA drivers for your particular machine, this again you can do by searching on the net, and you will most probably get the relevant drivers from the manufacturer's website, after you have downloaded the relevant SATA drivers for your laptop model, extract them into one folder and later u can get them inside ur xp installation disk using the insert function in nlite.
Once the integration process is done you can burn your integrated disk as a bootable cd when this is done you can now use your cd to install a fresh copy of win xp on your CQ40 series laptop.
But this is just the beginning or ur problems
getting the drivers for windows xp for this particular laptop is a big pain, I have posted the drivers in sky drive, when you click on the links you will be taken to the skydrive site and you can download using the download button on the right hand pane of the window, if you are taken to the filefactory website you do not need to pay or get a premium account, you can log in as a free user and download the files for free.
The sequence for installing the drivers is: chipset, uaa, audio, graphics followed by other drivers
- First install the Chipset driver, you can get it from here
- The chipset driver will be followed by the Audio driver (DO NOT install the graphics driver before the audio driver)
If you have slipstreamed your Windows XP installation CD with SP3 you will not need the Universal Audio Architecture, but if it is not slipstreamed with SP3 then you will have to install the UAA first before proceeding with the Audio driver. You can get the UAA from here
- After installing the UAA , download and install the audio driver from here
This will create a swsetup folder in C drive ("C:\swsetup\sp34200")
Installing this driver may result in an error. However, you can continue with the following steps to get the audio driver to work.
- Go to Start and select Run. In the Run box type devmgmt.msc and press enter
- Right click on "Audio device on High Definition Audio Bus" then click update driver
- Select "Install from a list or specific location"
- Click Next, then select "Don't search, I will choose the driver to install"
- Click Next and select "Sound, video and game controller" from the list.
- Click Next and then click Have Disk
- Click Browse C:\swsetup\sp34200 folder and select the .inf (wis30b2a) file and click open and Continue with the onscreen instructions
- The next step is to install the graphics driver download it from here
- You can also install the driver for the modem now (although nobody uses a modem anymore these days) for modem driver click here
You can restart the machine at this point and XP should be able to keep the audio driver and you will be able to hear XP's familiar welcome sound.
For webcam driver click here
For ricoh 5 in 1 card reader driver click here
In case u have any particular problem concerning this laptop u can post a question and i will try to answer it for you.
