XP Drivers for AR51SU (UK)

[rozannas]

I am looking for XP drivers for VAIO-AR51SU (English) notebook. Is it possible to install XP Pro on this model? Especially, regarding to S-ATA disk drives.

Thanks in advance,
Rozan

[Blencogo]

Hi rozannas and welcome.

Sony appear to have no plan to develop XP Drivers and XP Utilities for the AR-Series. XP Pro does not suit this model as you will lose the TV Function and the Blu-Ray Playback (and a lot more). This is a media centre PC and needs to run XP Media Centre or a Vista edition with Media Centre included.

You may obtain basic functionality using the AR21 Drivers but you would have been better off buying a less expensive model.

[rozannas]

Thank you very much for this valuable information. Losing my hope for exact drivers is also valuable in this case. Since I use my notebook for development purposes, I think it won't hurt losing multimedia functionality. Since I will dual boot XP with Vista, I can run Vista if I need these functions. Vista really annoys me and I don't think I can live with. Even basic file operations are problematic and slow as well as killing an unresponsive program is nearly impossible!!!

Thanks again,

Rozan