Question about XP driver for Toshiba X205-9359

[cpfman]

Hello everyone. This is my first post in this forum and I have a question that I hope someone can give me an answer on. I am seriously considering buying the new Toshiba X205-9359 (CompUSA has it on sale for $2099.99 until 10/27, and this is the lowest price I have seen for this model). I currently own a Toshiba Saltellite 5205-S505 which I have had now for 4 years without a single problem. I run XP Pro on it and I know that the new laptop would come with Vista Ultimate. Well, I need to run XP Pro but I want to keep Vista also so I plan on doing like I done in the past with other pcs and run two operating systems on it. However, my question has to do with the availablity of XP drivers for this new Toshiba X205-9359. I don't need to use all the ability of the graphics card under XP Pro, for that I'll boot into Vista. But to run my general apps (Word, Frontpage, general programming software, no gaming under XP) I just wanted to know that if I loaded a second OS on this system that I could get drivers that would let me run ok. Anyone have any thoughts or experiences in that area? I'd appreciate anything you might have to say about this.

Thanks!

[GrandAdmiral]

Have a look around on the Toshiba website. If you're lucky they'll have decent XP driver support. If not then you could try asking around this forum for help. There's a great thread for the HP Pavilion dvx500 series so there might be one for the series of Toshiba you're looking at. If you're reasonably confident with Windows XP you could try finding the XP drivers by yourself before you buy. Just look for a detailed list of features and then work through it to get a rough idea of how much luck you'll have. I had to for my dv6519tx and it wasn't as difficult as i though it would be.

Just as an additional note, if the laptop has a SATA hard drive you'll need to slipstream SATA drivers into your copy of XP otherwise it wont recognise your hard disk. I used a program called nlite, its easy to use and can be downloaded from the net. Make sure you get exactly the right drivers, it wont hurt the computer if you dont but you'll have to burn a new slipstreamed CD each time you stuff up. You could probably download a mob of likely candidates and slipstream all of them into the CD, XP will work out which one is correct. Good luck!

[y2khardtop]

the XP disc won't recognize your SATA drives, but you can get it to work (I slipstreamed and XP disc with the drivers added). I was also able to find network drivers at the Realtek and Intel sites. So far, I'm stuck with just tracking down sound drivers. I'm a gamer, so I do need sound, but I'm optimistic.

Toshiba doesn't support this, so you won't find drivers from them.