Hello Friends. I have a dell Xps 501 Laptop with i5 processor and intel 5 series ahci based chipset. My laptop came with 64bit Win 7 OS but i wanted my old Xp on it. when i try to install the window xp sp3 with sata ahci raid drivers slipstreamed in the xp sp3 cd i still get the acpi.sys error with blue screen. acpi.sys is a hardware power management file and nothing to do with ahci support. i dont know whether xp supports the acpi (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) hardware on my laptop. I also tried to install xp with by disabling the AHCI mode and switching to ATA mode but of no use. I find this forum with genius people. Can any one please help me on this error to install xp on my laptop. Thanks
The operating system needs support for hardware beyond that of just installing a driverm, and XP doesn't support the latest gen hardware, its as simple as that! Even if you could get the laptop working you won't be able to make full use of it (beyond the 4gb ram issue or Directx 10.x/11). If there is an absolute need for XP due to specific software that you are required to use that doesn't work on Win 7 x64, you can use XP mode (which runs a special XP under virtualisation, which is NOT for normal use, just for the situation of running those programs). If its just a preference thing, then you should get used to using Windows 7! once you do things like selecting 'small/large icons' under control panel etc its far superior to XP. I'd ignore what people say under the link in the Dell forums, like the following extract of a person complaining about not being able to install XP: Seems people still don't know you can't utilise 4gb of ram on XP, let alone 6GB! Why run such an old OS anyway? And why get a 'high end' computer only to run XP on it?!!!