I would like to *upgrade* from Vista to a more familiar experience - Windows XP SP2. I have a valid box copy of XP SP2 bought new just two months ago - I want to make sure that I have the proper SATA drives for XP before proceeding - can anyone tell me where to find them? MOTHERBOARD INFO: Chipset # Intel Northbridge: NG82945GC # Intel Southbridge: FW82801GB Other Chipsets # LPC ITE8712 # Azalia Audio CODEC (ALC883) # LAN Realtek 8100C (10/100 M LAN)

I did some searching and found the Northbridge chipset and graphics drivers. Link below for those. However, the Sound drivers may be a problem. The ALC883 is a Realtek HD sound chip. There are drivers available for that chip. In the past others have had problems getting the sound to work right under WinXP when downgrading. I would advise you to tread cautiously. You could try running WinXP in a virtual mode by using Virtual PC 2007 in order to test the drivers without making the full committment. The download from MSoft is free. Here is a link for Virtual PC and for the other mentioned above. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/... The chipset and graphics drivers are located at the first link below. You want the 945GC drivers. http://www.intel.com/support/chipse...

How do I, from those downloads, create the floppy drive with: \PIDE \RAID TXTSETUP.OEM I have read I will need that for the Windows XP install disc see the SATA drive at all.

I'm think your Intel chipset has native SATA support. You need to set the BIOS settings in an IDE compatibility mode is all. I have read that WinXP SP3 has SATA drivers included. You could slipstream SP3 into your installation CD by using nLite. Do you care about the HD sound working correctly? If so you might try Virtual PC first. I don't think you will need to install any SATA drivers to run WinXP in virtual mode. But to answer your question about how to place SATA/RAID drivers on a floppy disk. You may need to unzip the files then copy all the resulting files to the floppy. If the file is a self extracting file then designate a formatted empty floppy as the target to send the files.

I wasn't that concerned with audio, so I did the upgrade... went much smoother than I expected. Was able to install all drivers using the original install disk that came with my computer. Now that I am running XP, my computer is running like a gazelle instead of a tortoise. How Vista can be thought of anything other than a total failure is beyond me - can you say Millennium Edition Part Deux ;)

So what about the sound? I would like to know if the sound is working right. What service pack do you have installed?