Hi

I have the AR630E - a very slick laptop. I installed XP on the laptop
by using nLite and including the newest chipset drivers from intel. I have
been able to locate drivers and get most of the devices working.

Unfortunately the sound and camera do not work for me. I have spent a lot
of time fooling around with various realtek and sigmatel drivers trying to
conjure up a working sound system with no success.

Has anyone else gotten the sound to work on the AR630E under XP? If so do
you remember what your recipe was?

Later

Mark Hittinger
bugs@pu.net

Mark Hittinger wrote:
You could have accomplished much the same by turning off all of the
Vista eye-candy, and set Classic folders.

Unless Sony has the missing drivers on the site for your notebook, you
are probably screwed. Sony has no interest in downgrading; Sony has not
much interest in upgrading, either.

Q

Dude can you ZIP those drivers and upload them to rapidshare? i have
the same laptop and i really wanna XP!!.

thanks
Thegoldstar.

Quaoar <quaoar@marcabfleet.net> writes:
Actually Sony has been steadily releasing XP downgrade driver sets for all
of their laptops. The latest list includes BX4, BX6, CR1, FZ19, FZ29,
G1, G2, SZ4, SZ5, SZ6, SZ7, TX5, TZ1, and the TZ3 series.

This means that Sony is quietly onboard with those that want to abandon
Vista. In my particular case they have not yet addressed the AR6 series
but I am sure they will get to it.

Later

Mark Hittinger
bugs@pu.net

bugs@pu.net (Mark Hittinger) writes:
Well I found partial answers on some of the laptop forums. Sound is now
working for me. Here is the recipe with the secret ingredients :-)

1. Obtained nLite and read in my XP install CD
2. Downloaded Intel chipset drivers, insert them into "new" CD with nLite
3. make disk image backup of vista in case you need it
4. use "new" install CD to install XP onto SATA disk
5. Nvidia driver - found 15655.exe on the internet - this worked
6. Intel for the 4965 wireless driver
7. marvell yukon pci-e gigabit driver from their site
8. Sound was a real pain - there are tricks - there are two sound systems
realtek and sigmatel. Give up on the realtek for now.

a. Get the sz640 XP sigmatel driver from sony
b. disable the realtek device (10EC:0262)
c. don't disable the sigmatel device (8384:7664)
d. if kb835221 (a microsoft update) is installed then de-install it
e. install kb888111 (a microsoft update)
f. install the sz640 XP sigmatel driver
g. you may need to disable \MEDIA\ROOT\000 if it shows up

9. Some misc devices (memory card, modem, pointing, bluetooth, etc) the
drivers supplied with vista may have worked - or XP supported them.

So I am still unable to get the camera to work - I have tried several of
the various Sony drivers for the camera. It looks like the same camera
is in the other Sony laptop models that Sony has released XP downgrades
for.

Others have spent time trying to get the S1/S2 buttons to work and are
reporting success but I didn't care about these.

Later

Mark Hittinger
bugs@pu.net