Reviving an old laptop

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Not sure what is the proper adjective for a three year old laptop. But apart from the language issue the thing is that I was asked to give a clean start to an HP nc6000 laptop. It seemed a no-brainer to install Windows XP SP2 or so I thought.

While the install worked as expected, there were bad news afterwards: The system booted but nothing worked as expected: Graphics card,Ethernet, SD memory slot, Cardbus slots and Wifi adapter did not work at all.

I am not sure whether the laptop was shipped with a driver's CD-ROM or not. The owner told me he had nothing like that.

A few Google searches later I've discovered several drivers websites trying to make a buck out of the poor souls that could not find the drivers CDs. Some users also complained about HP not making the drivers available and, of course, standard drivers on SP2 not working with HP hardware.

Later on I did find an entry on an HP website that contained the drivers. The problem is that it actually contained too many drivers. It seems that under the same name the manufacturer has been using different peripherals. So I had to choose between an Intel or an ATI VGA adapter and among different Wifi cards. Eventually, after trial and error, I could get the system back to life with everything working. It took a while though.

I guess the moral is that you better keep your driver's CD at hand, just in case.

Oops, I swear the driver page I provide worked for me, but when I've checked the link it is no longer working ...  (?)

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