Continuing my rant on Vista issues from last month… I recently purchased a new HP Pavilion dv9700t notebook to replace the one my boyfriend accidentally cracked. The day after it arrived, I attempted to downgrade the OEM Vista to XP Pro using a disk I had before. Sounds easy enough right?

It’s been two weeks now, and I can’t say I’m that much closer to getting the laptop set up in a way that’s ready to use…this could easily be one of the most frustrating OS install I’ve ever encountered. Granted, I don’t do this all the time, but it shouldn’t been this difficult to figure out either!

So far I’ve gotten past the “hard drive not found” error by purchasing an external USB Floppy Drive, made 2 boot disks containing mysterious drivers, reinstalled XP Pro, and hunted down all but 5 of the hardware drivers that I need to reinstall. Unfortunately, those missing 5 include Ethernet, Wireless Network, NVIDIA Graphics Card, and Audio… which means the laptop is still mostly useless.

I would highly appreciate any input on where to locate these missing drivers.