Search for Working XP Drivers after Downgrading from Vista

36 Responses to “Search for Working XP Drivers after Downgrading from Vista”

• JMontes@Gateway Drivers May 21, 2011 at 6:26 am

  I also like using tool to accomplish tricky task like this.
  thanks for sharing your list.
• james April 7, 2011 at 7:57 pm

  original post:
  raymond.cc/blog/archives/2011/04/07/slimcomputer-and-pc-decrapifier-safely-uninstall-unnecessary-pre-installed-software/

  i tried slimcomputer. the same company provides slimdrivers

  driverupdate.net/

  and its a free option

  cons:
  requires free registeration
  manually update drivers one at a time

  pros:
  its free!
• zifyon November 8, 2009 at 1:13 pm

  please help me. i don’t have driver dv3000 for xp…
  pleaseeee….
• Ikung June 18, 2009 at 6:38 pm

  Sometimes if you update your service pack to service pack 3 for Windows XP may solve the problems. Who knows…. :-)
• Osman June 11, 2009 at 7:29 pm

  I can’t ever find XP drivers for Vista 4730ZG………..
• ken March 22, 2009 at 1:30 am

  i also bought a name-brand pc pre loaded w vista, and reverted back to xp. used Everest Home, CPU-Z, and anything i could read & google off the motherboard to gain drivers. one thing to note is that after wiping the hd and all the proprietary ‘rescue’ partitions & mountpoints, you may need to physically disconnect the fancy extra SATA devices like a 4 in 1 card reader, (they look kind of like a USB connection on your motherboard) or else they will be recognized as C/D/E/F drives even before your HD
  ~ken
• venkat March 17, 2009 at 2:39 pm

  Drivermax is best driver backup and restore software ,only thing it annoys is asks license key
• Fred March 17, 2009 at 8:11 am

  I was thinking of doing this on a Packard Bell Imedia X2416. No surprises PB don’t have any XP drivers. The only thing that was/is stopping me is that I don’t know if there is a complete set of XP drivers in existence. Google for once let me down searching for the hardware Everest reports. And I am not keen on doing it and then finding the very proprietary chipset or something else vital is not XP friendly. Then having to reinstall Vista from those ‘Great’ backup disks all these cheap skate manufactures are so keen on, or worse buy Vista.

  Do any of these programs tell you before you take the plunge that XP drivers are indeed available or will they just report Vista drivers as that’s what it’s running?
• Helena Russero March 16, 2009 at 2:17 pm

  There is no point for a PC Updater like RadarSync or Detective to detect unknown drivers. those utilities job is bring us download of the KNOWN, not the unknown. Even windows doesn\’t know… I will still go with RadarSync Free, it saves me a lot of research time!!
• JD March 16, 2009 at 1:07 pm

  you may like to use one of those PC updater apps. they don’t mind your PC model, or the vendor of your PC. They go one DEVICE at a time (VGA, sound, printer, scanner, etc), search if they have a new driver for it, and send it to you. Some of those are free, such as DriversMax, and RadarSync. RadarSync is much better. Good luck.
• Atish March 13, 2009 at 10:31 am

  hi all, i have HP DV3000 laptop i downgraded it to winodwsx xp sp3. all the drivers are ok but whenever i plug any usb device its ask for drivers
  but my usb stick works fine in all ports
• Raymond March 12, 2009 at 12:10 am

  Err.. because they are automated? And not everyone knows if the driver found on Google works or not? Don’t think that everyone here is a pr0 :P
• Matriel March 11, 2009 at 11:35 pm

  i still dont understand a thing. I always fond drivers using google, in the 98% of the cases i always found what i needed, and the most the only one driver missing is the modem (who cares? noone uses that actually). In other cases, i take notes of the Vista’s drivers and use programs like everest to have more informations. Why use these programs?
• mohan March 11, 2009 at 4:41 pm

  Excellent share!!
• trypu March 11, 2009 at 3:05 pm

  all in one search engine
• Miggel March 11, 2009 at 1:03 pm

  I like vista,i never go back too xp.
• khol91 March 11, 2009 at 11:35 am

  If you want to install a fresh version of XP on more than one computer it might just be easier to check out driverpacks.net/ and download almost every driver for almost any device. It will automatically install all the drivers you need and delete from your HDD the ones you don’t need. Best of all it is completely free. I myself ahave made a cd including most of the driver packs, and I haven’t had a single problem with it so far.
• aBg_rOnGak March 11, 2009 at 8:14 am

  Meia…please revise your words….I do not know where you live and what brand is your desktop/laptop PC, but some of us out here use a bit lower end (and sometimes higher end) Acer, Compaq or Toshiba (to name a few) computers that DO NOT have official driver for Windows XP, even from respectives’ official websites
• Albaraha March 11, 2009 at 5:14 am

  There are some CD/DVD\’s which contain over 5000 drivers and some more than 7500 drivers.
  So, grabbing the CD/DVD iso file and burning it is the most suitable for me to use it on many computers.
• noprob March 11, 2009 at 4:19 am

  What about “Unknown Devices”?

  It is dated,but has helped me alot.

  halfdone.com/ – freeware

  also thx. Raymond for all your work on this blog!
• mafia87 March 11, 2009 at 4:00 am

  Driver Max is a great program… Driver detective is the best… but it’s very hard to find crack, etc… huhu…
• David Bradley March 11, 2009 at 2:52 am

  Surely, the move from Vista to XP is an upgrade? ;-)
• Alex March 11, 2009 at 12:40 am

  Hi,

  The other day I have just had a terrible experience reinstalling a HP laptop. The drivers were incredible hard to find. The reason of my reinstall was to get rid of the Vista preinstalled OS. :)
• nawarudin March 10, 2009 at 10:52 pm

  Good info..ray
• Raymond March 10, 2009 at 10:25 pm

  Meia, not all PC vendor’s website provide XP drivers for computers that came with Vista pre-installed. Downloading drivers from blogspot (untrusted) website? I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

  Can’t blame you for being inexperience because you’re still a student in USM.
• Meia March 10, 2009 at 8:55 pm

  wat a nonsense and useless post.
  after downgrade from vista to xp, it’s not hard to find a driver.
  i direct dl from official web site such as acer, ibm etc, and some blogspot webs, faster than using Microsoft Windows Update to scan N minutes and then said the driver is up-to-date (but actually there’s a unknown devices error.)
• ramsri March 10, 2009 at 6:42 pm

  Yeah Raymond don’t forget your old article “The Easiest Way to Automatically Install Device Drivers on Any Windows XP Computer” It did most of the trick for me. I’m using those drivers pack almost all drivers are getting installed. Good post…
• Kees March 10, 2009 at 5:35 pm

  Addition: If people want to downgrade to XP it is always wise to run a PCWizard before uninstalling Vista, because it might reveal most of the hardware components of your PC. It may save you quite a bit of searching afterwards.
• Kees March 10, 2009 at 5:26 pm

  Thanks, Raymond, undoubtedly really useful for many of us.
• Masca March 10, 2009 at 5:25 pm

  Cheers Ray, this is definatly going to help me along Vista downgrades. Another great article :)
• aslikhar March 10, 2009 at 4:42 pm

  used to with drivermax
• Nedo March 10, 2009 at 4:39 pm

  thank u Raymond for the tip…
  but there’s 1 problem..
  if u got a missing network adapter driver u won’t be able to download any of this software and updating them to the latest database !!..so u r stocked without internet connection !!
• Natella March 10, 2009 at 4:01 pm

  I also do hate one must register first to use Driver Max and besides they make copies of all your existing drivers. And as for Radar Sync i red somewhere in internet that it often tries to install even older drivers then those that are on user,s computers.
• vir March 10, 2009 at 3:54 pm

  I ever try to use driver genius list above, i think that it function just to backup the driver …
  or this feature not available for ver 8.
• aBg_rOnGak March 10, 2009 at 3:29 pm

  Lucky for those who have Wireless Broadband (celcom/Mxs/P1/DG), but for those who doesn’t, & don’t have drivers for Ethernet & Wifi controller, that’s just too bad for them…anyway, I almost bought Driver Detective…luckily I almost reach my credit limit :-P
• john Matt March 10, 2009 at 3:09 pm

  Hi Ray…. Many thanks for this update. However Yest finished this difficult task of finding drivers (Manually) for xp after downgrading….anyways thanks…………