topic Downgrade VGN-N21E/W to XP, Wireless Lan Issue in PCs & Accessories

Downgrade VGN-N21E/W to XP, Wireless Lan Issue

fadsta — Tue, 29 May 2007 23:49:08 GMT

Hi All

I recently bought(to add to the collection) a VGN-N21E/W for my sister and Vista was just not doing it for me. Almost every software she wanted was incompatible or kept freezing, so i decided to downgrade it to XP.

The installation was almost fully successful and I did this by 1. Creating recovery disks 2. Complete wipe of hard drive 3. Installing XP.

All the drivers seem to have being installed perfectly apart from the wireless card. It a "lan express ieee 802.11 pci adapter" and it doesn't seem to start. After trying a few things, i realised that Vaio's use two programs to control things like this. 1. Wireless Lan Starter 2. Switching Utility of some sort.

I'm guessing that the Wireless Lan Starter is what controls the switching on/off of the card but i cannot find this program to download. Im also guessing that if I used kpac.exe as suggested here , considering it was originally for Vista, I mite run through some incompatibility issues.

Im also gonna be trying to use kpac.exe to extract these softwares from recovery disks of my SZ1XP and see if they work.

If anyone can suggest anything else that I could try, will be much appreciated.

Re: Downgrade VGN-N21E/W to XP, Wireless Lan Issue

Blencogo — Tue, 29 May 2007 23:59:13 GMT

Hi fadsta,

Why not download the Preinstalled XP Drivers and the Preinstalled XP Utilities for the VGN-N11S which has the same specifications except for the processor and the Operating System. These should cover all the devices on your Vaio for use with XP.

Sony Vaio-Link XP Downloads for VGN-N11S

Re: Downgrade VGN-N21E/W to XP, Wireless Lan Issue

fadsta — Wed, 30 May 2007 00:32:54 GMT

Thanks for the quick reply Blencogo,

I had already tried that without any luck. I keep getting .dll file missing error for a few things. I think the problem is now that ive tried too many things. Gonna try and uninstall as many things as I possibly can and re-install them freshly.

Thanks again.