Waxin’ Lyrical

I bought a laptop a while ago to prepare for my exchange to Japan - the Acer Aspire 5920 “Gemstone”.

She’s a nice laptop, with all the Santa Rosa bells and whistles, if a bit on the heavy side (3.0kg), and pretty fast too, considering the 3.2~3.4k 3dmark06 score (my desktop PC scores a piddly 1.4k). However, Vista, which came bundled with the laptop itself, wasn’t exactly as snappy as I liked it even after I removed all the cruft that Acer put in, and I found using Vista itself to be pretty unwieldy.

So I thought I’d put XP on her too, and jot down over here what it took to get everything going, although hopefully I won’t have to do this again (crosses fingers). Eh, who am I kidding…

1. XP’s installation CD won’t detect the laptop’s HDD, because it’s on SATA. Since the Gemstone doesn’t come with a floppy drive I had to slipstream the SATA drivers onto the CD.
To get the drivers, I had to download the Intel Storage Matrix drivers for the Mobile Intel® PM965 Express Chipset and install them in Vista. This extracts the archive into C:\Programs\Intel\Intel Matrix Storage Manager, and in there there should be a Driver directory with the required drivers. I tried extracting the driver archive with uniextractor and winrar, but this was the only way I could access the stuff in the archive.

1.1 When slipstreaming the SATA driver there’re a few to choose from. The Gemstone uses the ICH8R SATA controller. I also slipstreamed the INF update that was available on the Intel website as well.

2. Install XP as usual on the second partition D:. After installation completes, I can only boot in XP.

3. Restore the Vista bootloader by using VistaBootPRO. Under the System Bootloader tab, select Windows Vista Bootloader (Uninstall Legacy Bootloader) and All Drives. Then, after it’s done, run the diagnostics. If there’s a red entry for “Previous Windows Version”, set the boot drive to the drive that NTLDR is on (C:\). This let me dual-boot Vista and XP.

4. Install drivers for the rest of the hardware.
Video drivers: I used the 162.18 drivers on laptopvideo2go for XP. (Edit: Added the link. Make sure to read the guides on how to install them.)
Sound drivers: Realtek High Definition Audio Codec Drivers.
Network Drivers: Intel Wireless 3945ABG. Wasn’t this supposed to have 4965AGN!?
Webcam Drivers: The “Suyin” directory in C:\Drv contained XP drivers.
Synaptic Touchpad: Again, C:\Drv contained XP drivers for the touchpad, although the directory name slips my mind. This lets the touch media keys work in XP.
Bluetooth Drivers: The “BTW” directory in C:\Drv contained only Vista drivers. However, turning on the Bluetooth and then manually pointing XP to the folder containing the 32-bit drivers installed them succesfully. Preliminary bluetooth communication with my mobile seems ok.
CIR Drivers: The “CIR” directory in C:\Drv contained only Vista drivers. The device in the control panel is the last one that reads “Unknown Device”. Manually updating the driver by pointing XP to the folder installed the succesfully - however, I have the device disabled atm.
Ricoh 5 in 1 Card Reader: Unfortunately I couldn’t find any provided drivers in the Drv directory. However, working drivers can be found on the HP driver website - SP33604.exe.

Modem: I couldn’t be bothered with this and disabled it. This probably uses the Microsoft Universal Audio Architecture Bus Driver.

Maybe someone else’ll find this useful too, heh.