Just bought an HP Pavilion a6430f desktop . I have purchased a Vista based machine in the past. I've learned that Vista is frustrating beyond belief. So I bought XP Home and tried to install it. UGH. Seems the motherboard drivers are all Vista (no XP version available on HP site, HP support don't have any in the closet either). Motherboard is an Nvidia Ge Force, but I can't find drivers that relate to it either, and they tell me to talk to HP. Seems this board is not that new that it woudln't have been used in an Xp world somewhere. Any ideas? Machine works, except NIC drivers don't - onboard module that supports two USB and one LAN port. Sound drives also appears to not work either.
grab a hold of driver genius it will let you know what drivers are installed on your system and let you download ones for all windows OS's
Well, I may as well reply to my own post on here.... Once I got the Windows 7 Upgrade pack (which was supposted to be free, but actually cost £12.78 post and packing!), it gave me option to do a clean install. So I created another partition and installed it there, so I now have the option of booting into XP or Win-7. It also now shows Vista as an option but doesn't actually work when I go into it - not bothered about that anyway. Still not solved the problem of XP drivers for the graphics card, but at least everything works in Windows 7 and I seem to have all the correct drivers for that.
If you want to remove Vista you may find that at ,least some versions cannot be uninstalled, and you cannot install over the top of Vista. The only way is to reformat the hard disk, but there are potential traps for unwary players. For details, have a look at my reply today on the Vista page of this forum to somebody else who wanted to do the same thing OldZ80