Windows XP on The Mini-Note: Easy To Install But Lots of Set Backs

I have finally found the solution to end my Mini-Note Vista woes.  Or so I thought. This morning I braved the Windows XP installation on the Mini-Note. I spent a few hours attempting a dual Vista and Mini-Note boot up set up, but I think yesterday’s installation of Xubuntu might have royally messed up the boot-up manager.

Either way, my installation of XP was a success. Thanks to Brad Linder I had very detailed instructions.

I jumped head first into testing out XP on the Mini-Note. The XP boot up is really speedy. Check out the video below, which is less than a minute long! That is the best  time I have had so far, including all my Vista tweaks.

Beyond the boot up, the OS works speedily. It was easy to launch programs and there is no problem running a few of them simultaneously.

However, due to a lack of drivers for the Mini-Note’s hardware, I wasn’t able to connect to the Internet via Ethernet or WLAN, and I had no sound. In order to fix these issues you can go get the drivers. I had an easy time getting the Broadcom Ethernet Driver. Once that was installed, I was able to connect to the Net with a hardline. But being that this is a “netbook” I wanted to get on the net wirelessly. Can you blame me?

Getting the WLAN drivers should have been easy through a Microsoft Update, but I ran in to load of problems when I tried to do a custom update. As soon as  I downloaded the update and restarted the system, the Ethernet driver disappeared and I was unable to connect to the Internet even though a cable. Any ideas from the crowd on how to avoid this issue and get the Ethernet and WLAN working correctly in XP?

All in all, it has been a rough few days working with the Mini-Note and its various OSes, but I think the MIni-Note has finally found a comfortable dweller in Windows XP, at least once HP pre-installs the OS and provides the various drivers for making sure its hardware components work.