(Your computer will be faster and more reliable using Windows XP vs. Vista)

After testing out Windows Vista on one of my 6 PCs laying around my apartment, I finally decided it was time to scrap Vista for Windows XP.

Well, it turns out my HP a6040n desktop I bought off the shelf at Fry’s sucked at downgrading to XP. Why?

You go to HP’s driver downloads and they don’t even have XP drivers. I think HP has to at least put the specs of all the parts on their site. I had to open up the case and track down the motherboard, and then found a generic Intel ethernet driver just to get the internet working.

What a hassle. I love HP computers but this was probably the worst experience. (Well, I could’ve called their tech support but I am too lazy.)

Another problem I encountered? Basically I got one of those blue screen of death because the harddrive is set to “RAID” on BIOS setup and Windows XP cannot detect that unless you got a driver for it.

So all I did was set the settings back to “IDE” on BIOS setup and the blue screen of death disappeared. Wala!
(Trust me, you really don’t need RAID unless you are thinking about running bunch of servers.)

I also did some research and found you can also completely re-format your harddrive using DBAN. Although it took me some 6 hours to DBAN my HP harddrive, it was worth it. DBAN is great if your harddrive seems to be protected or whatever. Just nuke it and go along.
I also made sure to re-partition with room for Ubuntu, which I will be installing next on this experimental PC.

I used to run all Linux computers with VMware running windows on it. It did pretty good and my computer never gave me a blue screen of death. All I had to do was reboot the Virtual Machine but I might be headed down that path again soon.

Now I feel so good, it feels like I really flushed that “hard stool” that was sitting in my gut for 6 months.

Good bye Vista!

Next up we will be covering a step-by-step transition on how to install Ubuntu and use VMware to experience a new way to access the internet. Of couse, if you get bored of our tutorials, you can always go buy a Mac, we like Macs too. (they are unix based, which is pretty much a fancy Linux machine really)

You should also check out the Vista-XP parody ad we made couple months earlier.

Tags: a6040n, apartment, Computer, Cool, DBAN, DoItYourself!, downgrade-hp-computer, downgrade-to-xp, fry, Hack, hp, hp-a6040, hp_a6040n, lc, Linux, raid, Ubuntu, windows_xp

This entry was posted by max on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Computer, Cool, DoItYourself!, Hack, Linux, Ubuntu.