How to downgrade VGN-UX390N from Vista to XP?

[willyhoops]

The VGN-UX390N comes with Vista Business and I hear that this entitles me to downgrade to XP Pro under the Microsoft Terms and Conditions - which i have started doing - my problem is how to get the many XP drivers I need.

The slightly older VGN-UX280P has very similar hardware and ran XP. But each time I try to install drivers from the old machine download driver page I get a message saying "this update is not intended for use with your computer model" and it stops. But when I try to run the newer Vista drivers for my machine it passes that point and then fails with various error messages like file not found (because these drivers are not for XP).

So the idiot drivers are checking the version of my machine somehow and this is death becuase i can't track down the drivers for most things at the manufactures web site. I can't even get the Marvell® Yukon 88E8036 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller Driver from the manufactures web site:

http://www.marvell.com/drivers/driverSearchResults.do?keywords=&selectedProductCategory=&selectedPro...

to work. And I am also stuck on the the critical mouse driver (without it mouse is unusable), the UGX Toshiba Bluetooth driver and the pen device. Of course Windows Update also falls to find all these drivers (I got the wireless working).

Oh god am I really going to have to throw out this damm machine?

Any way to overide the dumb drivers and tell them not to check the model number? (command line?)

Any way to get Sony to help?

Any ideas please?

Thanks willyhoops

[Blencogo]

I presume you are trying to download these drivers from the Sony USA Site as the UX has never been sold in Europe with XP installed.

Is your Vaio from the US? Sometimes the Sony USA site will prevent downloads to non-US PCs - I don't know but changing the International Settings to English (United States) may help.

If not, most of these drivers are shared with other Vaio Models. All the N-Series/FZ-Series/C-Series/G-Series Vaios use the Marvell® Yukon 88E8036 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller Driver so it can be easily downloaded from Sony Vaio-Link downloads for any of these models.

Just download Ethernet.zip from here, Extract the files (right-click on the .ZIP and choose "Extract All"): -

ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/PUB/OS/XPDOWNGRADE/FZ19/DRIVERS/

Install by right-clicking the ethernet controller in Device Manager and choosing to manually select the driver to install -> Have Disc -> browse to the extracted driver .INF file.

Similarly, you will find the Bluetooth Driver here: -

ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/PUB/OS/XPDOWNGRADE/TZ1-TZ2/DRIVERS/

etc.

Good Luck

[willyhoops]

Blencogo, yes this is a US machine.

Many thanks - that got the ethernet working.

Bluetooth yes that works too now. Not the best way - would have prefered just a driver and then to use the MSFT stack but I can't find that driver.

The video, audio & chipset I got from intel and realtek web sites.
Note when you do all this do the chipset first. See this link:
http://esupport.sony.com/EN/osmig/xpclean.html
Note I used XP Home - did not have an XP Pro disc

The mouse I got working at last using "Universal Extractor" (http://legroom.net/software/uniextract) to extract the drivers inside the .exe for the old VGN-UX280P model running XP.

Inside the .exe installers I see a checkversion.exe which runs to stop one running the install on different machines.

I also managed to get the pen working at last. I found a driver for the VGN-UX17GP an XP Australian machine:

http://www.sony-asia.com/support/download/56848/product/vgn-ux17gp?site=hp_en_AP_i

and right clicked on the human interface adapter in device manager then added the driver. Then I ran the install and now it all looks fine.

That's pretty much all done. You don't need the special keys for this little machine.

Running XP its about a donen times faster than Vista.

If anyone else wants to do this please email me at william dot hooper at gmail dot com and I can send the drivers I finally put together. Bascially it's taken me one and half full days work to get it all OK.

[willyhoops]

If you own one of these machines check out this thread:

VGN-UX390N Windows XP Drivers Thread One

VGN-UX390N Windows XP Drivers Thread Two

at micropc talk. These guys are the VGN-UX390N specialists.

Note for normal Sony Vaio problems I have recently found "notebook review" a much better site that this "club vaio" for support problems.

Sony Vaio Forum (Technical Support / Chat / Reviews)

And of course club vaio, being sony, has the worst forum interface in the market!

And with all those stickies on the first page of this forum plus a search that basically hardly works this forum is a nightmare to use.... reminds me of ATRAC haha