Hey guys. New proud owner of a Compaq CQ45-127TX reporting in here. RM2800, and they threw in a notebook cooler (useless IMO) and a flash drive.

It came with Vista Ultimate, which frankly is driving me up the wall. I'm doing my best to like Vista, but I'm pining for my XP on my old Compaq M2268AU. As expected, there are no XP drivers for the CQ45-127TX on Compaq's website.

It is not made any better by the fact that the notebook did not come with a Windows Vista DVD. Yes, I am aware that my copy of Vista is not legitimate. However, short of getting GRUB to work under Windows (I know its possible; I just dont have the time), a dual-boot solution will require the Windows Vista DVD.

Hence my question: how is driver support for the CQ45-127TX under XP? I do know from experience that the Intel Wifi drivers work under both XP and Vista. However, reading through this thread, there seems to be issues with getting SATA, chipset drivers to work under XP.

Is it worth risking installing XP on this fella? How much of Vista drivers are similar to XP drivers?

Thanks in advance.

Question no 1: do you have Sp3 or not for XP? To get all this HD sound things to work, you need KB888111 (I think. nice number BTW), BEFORE you install the drivers. And you need to real KB888111, not the one supplied by the manufacturers for it to work.

Don't know about the CQ20-213TU, but there is a chance that it might not work under XP.

If one is using Vista there should be no issues, as Vista has native support for HD Audio. KB888111 is for Windows XP only. Sound should actually work out of the box with Vista actually.