Toshiba A135-S2276 XP Upgrade Problems

hmm ok one thing that I see is missing is the Ports (COM & LPT) from the device manager. Think this might be what the 2 - ?'s are.

 

Greetings from Mars,
I just bought my first laptop. I went cheap, so I'd know what I liked or hated about laptops before (or if) I ever go for a high end one. So I got the Best Buy Toshiba Satellite A135-S2276 for $550. I find out afterwards Vista won't run most of my software, stats stuff and dragon voice recognition. So I take it back, and learned about the 15% restocking fee. Nice of them to let me know in advance. I decided to keep it and have a go at downgrading, rather than be out $75. So before I start, I'm wondering if some of you with experience in this operation, might tell me if you began with a reformat, or simply loaded XP right over Vista? I've downloaded the drivers found earlier in this thread, and have a few I scavenged up hunting on my own. Now I've got reformat jitters. Am I going to destroy this machine? What if it won't load? What if, what if, what if. Any advice or Don'ts?
Wyvern

 

DQI:

If you've read this thread a couple of times and have the drivers, you should be fine. You should reformat the partition that now contains Vista, which will be an option from the XP install CD. Leave the hidden partition intact, which has the Vista install files, in case you go back to Vista in the future.

PGIV

 

After spending 15 hours yesterday reading this thread several times and downloading and trying lots of drivers, I have a question for those who have been through the XP install on the A135-S2276.

I have everything working but the two 'unknown device' (which I don't care about ) and the modem. As anyone gotten the modem to work? I still have the "?" in front of "Modem Device on High Definition Audio Bus". I've tried every modem driver listed in this thread, which includes the only XP driver Toshiba lists for this notebook on their site.

The modem not working may not be a huge issue, since I may never need to use it, but if others were successful in getting it identified and working under XP, I would be most grateful for a link to the driver you used and anything unusual you had to do to get it working.

 

Try the software modem driver. I think its on the Vista disk and will work as an XP driver also.

Got some news today that ATI/AMD is the chipset manufacturer for this board and not INTEL, but I dont see anything on thier site except the 200m drivers which I havent tried. They have a southbridge driver that I installed but I couldnt find anything else, thought that might help with the 2 unknown items.

 

This is absolutely incredible. Vista is protecting itself from being formatted over. I can't even format the hard drive from DOS.

 

PackRatt: Thanks! I never noticed the drivers on the Recovery CD when I first looked at the disc the first time. The software modem driver worked!

DQI: Just put in the XP CD and when you get to the point of selecting the partition to install on, just pick the larger partition and choose 'format with NTFS'. I just put XP on two A135-S2276's and had no problems reformatting the Vista partition. You wouldn't be able to format from DOS since DOS doesn't see/recognize an NTFS partition.

 

hi guys, i got my A130-ST1312 today, and the first thing i did was to uninstall Vista and put on XP.

Then I had problems with my video card( nvidia geforce go 7600 ) , wireless controller, ethernet controller, sm bus controller, mass storage device. ---this was AFTER i installed all the drivers that came from Toshiba with this notebook.

And after 8 hrs, i got all the problems solved except the mass storage device( i don't really care about it, cuz my USB works fine). here is what i did:

For video card, i went to http://drivers.mydrivers.com. this was the easiest---if you know Chinese.

For wireless, I installed the software utility for the intel chipset(this solved the sm bus controller problem), and the intel wireless lan ( all the drivers can be found at Intel's website. you only have to know the exact right name/type of your chipset/wireless lan), and I upgraded Windows XP with SP2 and the wi-fi upgrade package from microsoft's website.
Then the wireless network starts working.

For the ethernet controller, I looked at driver software name in the system recovery CD that came with the computer, and found the type of my ethernet controller, which is a Realtek 1801(or somethin' similar...). And I searched google and found a WinXP driver for it. Then the ethernet problem was solved.

I also used the audio driver from turbo97se(really want to thank him/her! ).

Hope this is of a little help.

 

hi guys
i m thinking of buying another 512 mb ram for my ai35 2276.
but dont know its exact details and which company to buy.plz tell me the specifications for buying the ram.also tell me that the specifications for 512mb and 1gb are same or differnt??

 

FINALLY spoke with "customer care" as Toshiba after weeks of on-and-off trying.

When I explained how they were selling a product whose OS could not work with the initial supplied RAM, they said they'd file a complaint and request with engineering. However, the guy said he dealt with this issue before and that there's only one recommendation to their customers - buy more RAM.

That's right. Instead of an apology for selling a product that can not effectively work, they try to hawk another three digits of costs to simply get their brand new product to function. Talk about building a loyalty base. So that basically proved what we suspected - Toshiba no longer cares about their customer base and will knowingly attempt to rip you off. I'm considering filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau if these drivers don't magically appear on Toshiba.com within the next six weeks.

I've had this laptop much too long to be able to return it. If you still can, the 15% restocking fee will probably be worthwhile unless you want to give in and buy RAM and run Vista. If you're reading this and have regrets about your Satellite purchase, take it back while you still can. I wish I could have. In the mean time, I will continue the frustrating battle to get this laptop to work to my specs, though I almost just want to sell it on Ebay and call it a day.

Good luck everyone.

PS. I'm still having the troubles (out-of-sync video and audio, occassional lock-up and freezes, etc. from the other pages) if anyone has found solutions.