Yes, I said UPgraded.

As I mentioned a little while back, my old laptop went skydiving off a counter without a parachute and went kaput on me. (It fall down go boom.) My wonderful new laptop, on which this is being typed, is amazingly wonderful. It's uber-fast, super quiet, and surprisingly not a lap scorcher. (Not to mention it looks totally bitchin'.)

So anyway, the one ginormous problem I had with it was that it came pre-installed with Vista (Yuck! ) and Toshiba refuses to offer any support in providing the appropriate drivers for downgrading to wonderful Windows XP. I wasn't sure how successful I'd be, but I'm now running this beauty with XP Pro with about 98% proper hardware functionality, and here's how I did it...

The first hurdle was attempting to install Windows XP. When I first booted with the install disk I was presented with a very ugly message, something like "There was no hard drive found." The problem is that many notebooks nowadays have a SATA controller, but XP was not designed for such an unexpected situation.

Ugh. No problem, right? All we need to do is locate the driver and tell the installer to use it. Oh, wait. The only way Microsoft allows you to provide a driver for any hardware during installation is to stick it on a floppy during boot. Oh, what's a floppy, you ask? Right. Floppies are no longer existent on new laptops. After locating the SATA controller drivers, I used a wonderful program called nLite to merge the drivers onto a copy of my boot disk. Yay! (A fantastic step-by-step demonstrating exactly how to add your SATA controller's drivers to your Windows XP boot disk CD.)

After installing, a quick look at the hardware shows that most devices aren't recognized. It took me days, but I was able to find drivers that seem to work for all the hardware on my Toshiba Satellite A205-S7466 with a couple of unfortunate exceptions. 1) My HD-DVD drive is unable to play HDDVD disks. 2) The same drive seems unable to burn discs. 3) The FN keys (function keys) don't work, so I can't turn up/down LCD brightness, among other things.

Hopefully at some point those broken features will work, but for now, I'd rather be on XP with those limitations than on Vista without. (XP has an idle footprint of ~200MB, while Vista eats up a minimum of a whopping 1GB always.)

That's my tale. Perhaps I'll upload my drivers for others trying to get past the same obstacles I faced...