Help finding win xp drivers for a gateway laptop

vistalavista

the model is Gateway md2614u

been searching for drivers everywhere (most important being the nic driver) but can't find any.

please help

jediknight

Unfortunately you may have your work cut out for you.

Gateway typically does not offer XP drivers (at least in every Gateway I've had that came with Vista) and if you call them and ask them they will even tell you that you will void your warranty if you install XP (although I'm not sure how that's possible). You will not find them on their website as a result.

You will want to go to the manufacturer of the network card site directly and download from there. Hopefully you have not formatted yet and you can just view the properties of the card and easily obtain the information of the card. I would actually do this on all your hardware just to make sure there are XP drivers available. I had a gateway desktop with a TV tuner card and the vendor only made Vista drivers!

Hope this helps.

pennystrader

Go to device manager and see what network driver what companies network driver you have. I think this link may be what you are looking for and you will need to install it from the device manager if Marvell Yukon is it.

Marvell: Support

tiersten

Any particular reason why you're downgrading?

pennystrader

I would consider Vista to XP possibly an upgrade.

Now Windows down to XP would be a downgrade.

tiersten

pennystrader wrote: »

I would consider Vista to XP possibly an upgrade.

Now Windows down to XP would be a downgrade.

The laptop according to the specs I've found, comes with 64 bit Vista. If the OP wants to use XP 64 bit mode then they're in for some interesting times. Besides, if it doesn't work in Vista then it is probably not going to work under XP either...

pennystrader

The laptop according to the specs I've found, comes with 64 bit Vista. If the OP wants to use XP 64 bit mode then they're in for some interesting times. Besides, if it doesn't work in Vista then it is probably not going to work under XP either...


Hmm possibly. I purchased a Toshiba last year that was for Vista only and I dug around and of course found drivers and made it work perfectly on XP. For non techies this may be a problem but I wanted the challenge and XP runs much faster and doesn't bog down like Vista. 64 bit may be the only kicker here but I am sure you can get XP to run after finding the right network driver. The thing that makes it worth trying is that you can always put in the restore cd it came with and go back to Vista but at least keep trying with XP unless it seems like too big of a hassle.

My wife loved the fact I took the time to take Vista off of her laptop which kept prompting here and giving error messages and XP just ran. I upgraded the same laptop to Windows 7 Ultimate in Nov and it has run with no issues.

tiersten

pennystrader wrote: »

For non techies this may be a problem but I wanted the challenge and XP runs much faster and doesn't bog down like Vista. 64 bit may be the only kicker here but I am sure you can get XP to run after finding the right network driver.

The issue is that XP x64 Edition didn't get many users. Manufacturers never really bothered to release drivers for it. If they ever got around to making a 64 bit driver then it was when Vista appeared and whilst the Vista driver should work, I'd still expect odd issues. Even Microsoft has killed it off since SP3 doesn't exist for XP 64 bit since most of it was based on Server 2003 and not the original XP.

Of course, the OP might not be intending to run XP 64 bit anyway so this may all be a moot point.

I actually found Vista to be fine. The only time I had problems was when it was first released and driver support was generally bad. Apart from that however, I've never had any problems with it and it ran well enough for me. The manufacturer install of the OS is generally awful anyway so you would have fixed most of the issues just by reinstalling from a clean install disc and not the recovery crap.