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

April 30th, 2008 by Joanna Stern  

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.

Comments (3 Responses) 

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3 Responses to “Windows XP on The Mini-Note: Easy To Install But Lots of Set Backs”

  1. Brad Linder Says:
    April 30th, 2008 at 10:18 pm

    Wow, that’s strange. I definitely didn’t run into any problems with disappearing drivers. I did have a problem when trying to update from Windows SP1 (yes, I had an old disc lying around) to SP2. So the second time I installed XP, I just skipped from SP1 all the way to SP3. So I don’t know if there’s a problem with SP2 or with Windows update… my money would be on the latter.

    I assume you tried reinstalling the Broadcom driver after your reboot?

  2. Gian Says:
    May 1st, 2008 at 12:56 am

    In MiniNoteUser.com, a handful of users say that there is some problems on going from SP1. However, everything is solver when you use a SP2 disc. Head over to the wiki and there are instructions on how to get sound to work on the MiniNote.

  3. Charles J Marron Says:
    May 5th, 2008 at 8:14 pm

    well iam a big fan of computers cell phones that has internet access to e-mail my firndes around the wold I have friends in LA india london new york so now that the OQO2 came out i was like wow nice but is a lot of money i can use a small computer that i can use for college but is to much well my birth day is comming up soon in July 28 08 this computer is a good thing to have like i said i don’t have the money this is better than a video game I would to pick between a XBOX 360 and a OQO2 i will get the OQO 2 this weill sale better than a ideo game .

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