Silkroad Online Forums

....by uninstalling Vista and going to XP sp2. I retract most of my criticism of Joymax, even though they should try to make the game vista compatible. Seems like lots of people with vista notebooks are having the same trouble.

My new Sony VAIO had no drivers at all for XP, and Sony will never post any specific drivers for my model. This is the case for most OEM drivers on new Vista notebooks. This makes installing XP very difficult, if I was not sure it would help most people I would not even recommend it. However, it fixed all of my problems.

Some tips to help in downgrading vista notebook to xp:

Before you begin, get a program like Everest or Belarc to tell you every detail about all the hardware on your computer. Write all of this down, mine had about 10 devices and I would need to find drivers for all of them.

Next you will need a special program that can extract files from any executable installer that you download. Without this, the installers you downlaoad from other manufacturers will not install the drivers you need. Yes to get all the features on your notebook to work you may have to go to other manufacturers with the same chipsets to get the drivers. I found a really great program for this called Universal Extractor, you can google it.

Now you must download the above programs and write down the info and now you must download at least 3 different driver files which you think will work for your LAN port on your notebook in XP sp2. You will need to burn all this on a cd or use a flash usb drive or something. After you install XP if XP does not automatically make your internet work you will be unable to surf the net and search for the drivers for the rest of your hardware. You can try to put other drivers on your cd as well, but you will probably have to go searching as i did and you need the LAN to work to do that.

All the cool functions that are specific to your notebook, like special tracpad functions and power managements etc. will need to come from your maunfacuter. I got these for my sony by going to the most recent similar model 8 months ago that was still shipped with XP. then run universal extractor to get the drivers, go to device manager and update the drivers with the ones that work and BAM! stuff works.

Repeat the above steps for every device in your device manager that does not install automatically with the xp installation. YOu should be able to find all the drivers even if you must go to other manufactureres than yours.

Finally if you have a device that just will NOT install no matter what, here is what to do. For me it was the LAN Express 802.11g wifi would not install with any driver I downloaded. If you go to device manager and go to the properties of the device and get the hardware PCI identification info, this is what plug and play pci uses to identify your hardware. Cut and paste about the first dozen or so characters and google that. It should start with PCI and have letters numbers and slashes. Some manufacturers actually list what PCI info their drivers will work on, mine was listed in the IBM help section, called lenovo i think. Downloaded the file from IBM, extract with universal extractor, install new drivers in device manager, and BAM! works perfectly.

Installed latest silkroad, crashed one time bc my swap file was too small (1.5 GB swap file was too small !) and BAM! works perfectly runs very very smooth with video setting MAXED OUT and widescreen too. Now this computer runs SRO better than my older Athlon 1.6 GHZ desktop. YAY!