How to downgrade from XP to Vista on Sony Vaio

The installation
Sony US’ support website offers a guide to downgrading Vista systems to XP, but assumes you have access to an official ‘downgrade’ DVD. In the absence of such a disc, it was a case of installing my own copy of Windows XP followed by the drivers, one by one. There was, however, one additional consideration before getting properly under way.

The NS11J/S will happily boot from a Windows disc, but its hard disk employs a serial ATA (Sata) interface that needs a driver supplied on a floppy drive. Luckily this driver is one of the 19 downloads from the US website, so once I’d dug out a USB floppy drive and found a working disk for it, I was ready to go. Pressing F6 during the initial Windows installation accessed the floppy, but it subsequently asked me to choose the appropriate adapter from a list of four options. Worryingly, none of them did the trick.

Returning to the specifications of the NS11J/S revealed I should be selecting the ICH9M-E/M, but this wasn’t one of the four options offered on screen. Despite an unhelpful lack of scroll bars indicating extra options, I tapped the up and down arrows nonetheless to find 13 drivers were available, including the required ICH9M-E/M. Once selected, the installation progressed once more.

It’s easy to take Vista’s automatic recognition of most common Sata controllers for granted in new installations, only to come unstuck with XP, which sadly has no idea what third-party controller you’re using.

It’s bad enough having to find a working floppy drive and disk, but when the basic interface of the initial Windows installer doesn’t give any indication of the choices available, it’s easy to panic. It would surely have been much easier if the Sata download only contained a single driver for this specific controller.

The rest of the process went smoothly though. Windows was instructed to format the drive after which it installed itself. Then it was a case of going through the device drivers one by one. The UK Vaio seemed happy enough with what it was being fed, and gradually the exclamation marks in Device Manager were replaced with proper names for working hardware.

There were additional devices you may not find on an average desktop. Beyond the built-in webcam, there were drivers for both the built-in SD and Memory Stick card slots, which included icons for My Computer. It was nice to see the Memory Stick icon appear, as this had eluded me on my earlier Vaio TZ downgrade.

One final hurdle that tripped me up in the past concerned a software DVD player. I had originally installed Cyberlink PowerDVD on my Vaio TZ, only to find it failed to work. I then tracked down a Vaio-specific version of WinDVD on the Sony support site that did the trick.

With this in mind, I looked out for ‘WinDVD for Vaio’ again but it was nowhere to be found; my ex-demo Vaio hadn’t come with software CDs and I’d also wiped the hard drive. With no sign of the originally supplied WinDVD for Vaio and no easy way to get hold of it, I was beginning to fear I had lost any chance to play DVDs. Thankfully, though, a standard installation of PowerDVD 8 worked fine on the NS11J/S.

Downgrade complete
After a couple of hours, the laptop and all its devices were fully operational. While no slouch with the original Vista Home Premium installation, it felt even faster with a fresh copy of XP, starting Windows from cold in just 37 seconds and settling down soon afterwards.

I’d suspected US drivers would work fine on a UK model, but it was reassuring to confirm the theory in practice. Obviously this was just one case, and we can’t offer any guarantees it’ll work with your particular laptop ­ but it does prove if you’re careful about matching core configurations (chipsets in particular), then peripheral specifications, model names and even geographic regions may not be that important.