The drudgery of installing windows xp

I have a very old laptop. As in most of the laptops the first thing to stop working was the cd/dvd drive. So to install windows I always had to do it using a flash drive.

Installing widows 7 using a flash drive is easy , windows xp is a tricky task. So here I provide a list of resources I used to install windows xp (full with drivers).

1. Preparing the flash drive :

http://komku.blogspot.com/2009/09/wintoflash-guide-install-windows-xp.html

2. Installing : follow instructions on the aforementioned link

3. Installing drivers: This is a tricky part again. My laptop being an old compaq presario v6218, compaq/hp had stopped providing drivers for windows xp for my components. So after installing xp using the above procedure I had the following drivers missing :

1. ethernet controller

2. network controller

3. audio

4. touchpad

5. graphics acclerator.

Mainly, I could not connect to the internet using my laptop which was the source of all problems since every driver finder ..etc required a net connection.

The network driver was only found on the intel website after going through the specs of the processor.

Hopefully I won't ever need to refer to this blog again.