Compaq Presario F500 / F551AU

My bro has just bought one of these notebooks, it is quite nice for its price, a recommended buy for anyone looking at getting a notebook.

Now there was only one problem with this, and that is that it comes preloaded with Windows Vista Basic, which is fine if you don't care how well it will run. On the other hand if you want to downgrade to Windows XP. Because we all know how crap Vista is. So that is what my bro decided to do, which is where we ran into a slight problem of not being able to find any drivers for the particular model that we have, fortunately HP have a support crew that you are able to chat with online and it does not cost anything as far as I know, The tech that my bro spoke with was able to find all the needed drivers for us which was great.

So now that we have been through that process, I can now pass on that you all of you.

First of all we had managed to find all the the driver for the sound device / 56k modem. After talking with the tech we found out that you need to install a Microsoft HD audio driver before being able to install any drivers for the sound in windows XP. I am assuming here that Windows Vista already has that driver installed or what ever.

Anyway, here is the list of links for all the drivers for installing Windows XP on a Compaq Presario F500 / F551AU

F500 AMD chipset drivers for windows XP
NV61xx-Chipset_8.26_2kxp_WHQL.zip - this file was not found at the link supplied. a quick search of Google showed it is on driverguide.com, you will have to become a member to be able to download it though. As far as i know it is free, and is worth it for the driver. If I had some decent hosting somewhere I could upload them all for ease of availability. all drivers together take up 175MB

VGA Drivers
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp34001-34500/sp34390.exe
or
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp34001-34500/sp34044.exe

or there is a site that modifies the original drivers from Nvidia.com so that they will install on the GO6100 GPU that is in this notebook. For some reason they leave the GO6100 out of the list of cards that it can do in the inf file. once i have found it will put that link up here also.

Network card drivers:
http://support.toshiba-tro.de/tools/SatellitePro/spl10/win-xp/lan-spl10-xp-561810152004.zip

In order to install the High definition audio driver you need to install the Microsoft HD driver so here it is.

Microsoft Universal Audio Architecture (UAA) Bus Driver for High Definition Audio :
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp30501-31000/sp30739.exe

after installing the UAA bus driver restart the notebook.

Audio:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp32501-33000/sp32823.exe

Modem drivers:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp33001-33500/sp33050.exe

Synaptics Touchpad:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp32501-33000/sp32647.exe

Broadcom Wireless LAN Driver:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp34001-34500/sp34152.exe

Quick Launch/Easy Access Buttons:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp32001-32500/sp32421.exe

The above drivers are for Windows XP SP1. The only drivers that do not work in Windows XP SP2 are the Audio and Modem drivers. The below links are the drivers to be used with XP SP2. I think the main difference is that there is an update that addresses the UAA HD audio subsystem driver well anyway here are the links.

SP2 Drivers

Microsoft Universal Audio Architecture (UAA) Bus Driver for High Definition Audio:
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp32501-33000/sp32646.exe

High Definition Audio Driver:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp34001-34500/sp34200.exe

Modem driver:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp33501-34000/sp33742.exe

If you have issues with installing the Audio and modem driver then you will have to go into c:\swsetup\sp34200 and c:\swsetup\sp33742 folders and install them manually. although this will most likely not be needed as it worked for me first time.


Reboot after this and all should be well with the notebook now.

Yay you have now downgraded to a better operating system than Windows Vista. Now your notebook will run a lot faster than it did with Vista on it. and you can reclaim a whole heap of performance that was wasted on Vista trying to look good. An operating System needs to be functional, good looks are something that is only needed when if Operating System works properly, which sad to say Vista does not do well.

Also vista is highly paranoid when it comes to security, but is all good once all the security crap has been turned off.

The one thing that annoys me about Windows is that there is no one from the outside to offer improvements. It would be nice if the GUI in windows was optional and that it was not so tightly integrated so that if one part of the system fail the whole thing gets taken down with it.

Anyway I'm not here to rant about how crap a job Microsoft is doing. rather in telling you where to get XP drivers for a laptop that is supposed to run Vista. but with the specs that the system has it is hardly possible. it comes with 512Mb of ram. this must be upgraded to at least 1GB if not 2GB for it to be able to run Vista nicely.

Anyway. I shall also look for drivers for all the hardware to be run on Linux. mainly drivers for Fedora as that is what I am using.

Thanks for reading :)