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New rig with WinXP - getting troublesome.


Dogway

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Hello I'm going to build a new miniPC rig, and I still don't want to fully make the leap to 7. I hate everything onwards XP but I'm aware that sooner than later I will see myself forced to switch to a newer OS, I just don't want it now to be that moment. Maybe for my next rig (in 6 year aprox).

With this in mind I'm finding difficulties to find drivers for a mobo I had on mind, the Asus Z87 Gryphon, I find this to be a quality and solid mATX mobo, and still not overpriced. The specification says supported OS 7 and 8, does this mean I can't use XP with it? I go to its Drivers Page but there are lots of them not listed, for example I found surfing around there is a XP driver for the audio controller, but couldn't find one for the LAN I217-V, and I'm starting to think I won't find the Intel Rapid Storage drivers as well.

Can anyone advise me on this?

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Newer hardware and XP will be tough. If I wanted to use XP I wouldn't want to try and get a board with UEFI on it, such as that Asus board. Finding non-UEFI boards has become troublesome lately, as I also deal with people who want to use 32bit Windows 7 on a new computer but the OS isn't supported. XP is even more unsupported if such a thing is possible. So I'm mostly only finding boards that people don't want, such as ones with Atom or AMD CPUs.

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There will always be eBay for old hardware. :)

I'm not ever giving up!

And for new too I hope!

The problem is I normally use the PC for intensive tasks, encoding, rendering, so staying at old hardware is not going to help me... : (

I'm gonna install W7 on a VM and check how far I can tweak it to feel comfortable, maybe with a classic shell ©, 7plus, some autohotkey scripts, an aaron-arts theme and some new icons I can start to feel more at home... lol

Depending on that and during one month I will make my decision whether to go with a gryphon mobo (z87, W7), or a gigabyte sniper m5 (z77, Dual XP-W7)

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I would say that XP could have potential problems on a UEFI board since it isn't supported at all. I only get to work with current products so I do not have experience with it... yet. However I get the pleasure of porting an XP Embedded image to a UEFI board so I'll get to see first hand how it handles it.

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I don't find a reason to not work, it's UEFI just like BIOS, I would say it's quite independent of OS.

I'm gonna send a mail to Intel and ask whether they are going to make XP drivers or not, my next 6 years computer depends on that.

edit: By the way, only a question, is there any specific (Intel) driver tied to the z87 chipset that prevents me to download old driver versions an be good to go? Because the z77 (XP) drivers seem to be already outdated and well sorry to complain further but the Intel driver webpage is a complete mess so you never know what's actually in there.

Edited by Dogway
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I don't find a reason to not work, it's UEFI just like BIOS, I would say it's quite independent of OS.

Not really, really. (please read as NO! :realmad: )

A BIOS is a Basic Input Output System.

Basically at boot time it gathers some info from the hardware and stores this info in a given format and provides to the OS loader a set of interfaces to these data.

BIOS and EFI/UEFI do not share the same data format let alone the same way to access those.

Most EFI/UEFI have still a setting to "behave as BIOS" (or if you prefer a number of EFI/UEFI motherboards have also a BIOS).

A "normal" XP expects a BIOS.

There are ways (reFind, bootcamp, reFit or similar) to boot XP on a EFI/UEFI motherboard, basically the bootmanager replaces the BIOS and provides to the OS loader the "right" data:

http://refit.sourceforge.net/myths/

And we already had (almost) this same conversation.

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/163378-xpx86-win7x64-uefi-dual-boot-on-ssd/

Of course you are perfectly free to believe that EFI/UEFI is OS independent :).

jaclaz

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sorry jaclaz, I faintly remember that discussion, I on purpose parked that mentally for later to focus more on hardware, as you see I still haven't fully decided what to do, what I meant is that there is no physical constraint to install XP on a board sporting UEFI (regardless whether you are gonna use it or not). I nonetheless will re-read the thread when I got more time, because you surely give out valuable insights.

tomasz86: I'm not very interested on AMD, it would be to start my "research" from scratch just one month away from my purchase, and I'm more likely to hit a miss than not, I now rapidly googled a bit but it says mono-core performance is not as good, etc, normally you stick to brands that gave you good experiences and for me those are Intel, nvidia, etc because the software I use (CG) work nice on them.

For the moment I mentally switched completely from the 4670k+gryphon combo to a sniper.m3+3770k, 3770k is still a bit more expensive than the new i5 but I plan on buy a second hand unit, what I lose for this generation I gain it by switching to a higher grade CPU, despite boards not being as good.

Then I did a bit further research on regards of Intel XP drivers for Haswell, I found 2 drivers, for the Graphics and the SATA drivers. It seems they still make the drivers internally but not for the public, I guess they are delivered on demand for companies and stuff.

So what is all I need in order to make XP work on a Haswell mobo?:

 ・Audio Driver (not necessary if realtek)
 ・LAN Driver (Network driver) (available inside Win7 driver package)
 ・Intel 8 Series/C220 Chipset Driver (available?)
 ・Intel HD Graphics Driver (available)
 ・Intel Sata Driver (available official or modded)
 ・Intel Management Engine (available)
 ・Intel USB 3.0 Controller (never officially supported for XP so unrelated to Haswell: notes)

Edited by Dogway
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yeah, too bad its only for their boards. Anyway I'm not fully sure if a chipset driver is necessary for either install XP (I don't think so but... better safe than sorry when talking about investing money) or if it would hit performance badly since my past experiences told me that built-in drivers were pretty much enough.

Also a question to be sure, does Wifi (I have a wifi USB) need the Ethernet LAN controller in order to work, or it is independent?

Edited by Dogway
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It "should" work also for any other board based on the same chipset unless they changed the way it install.

Most of the time you can still find solution to get drivers working for an officially unsupported OS by using those from another OS.

Wifi should be independant.

Also the lan drivers for XP taken from either intel or asus (choose the lan driver for windows 7 32bits but anyway the package seems to contains all os) should work on XP.

The problem will be the usb 3 drivers as intel doesn't provide usb3 real drivers for XP but only null drivers (so usb3 ports become usb2).

As for audio, the realtek drivers (provided by Asus for win7 again the package seems to support all os) should work.

So the real problem is most likely, do you want to buy a mainboard and install on it an unsupported OS (for example linux isn't listed as a supported OS but it will most likely work perfectly (intel usb3 is supported under linux)) ?

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Thanks allen2, with the gathered drivers here and there and your help I finally decided to go Haswell. I really don't mind whether it is officially supported or not as far as I'm able to install XP. I know this will be my last XP system. USB3 can't be helped, it would be the same story even with Ivy.
The only thing I don't like of this board compared to the Gigabyte is audio, ok Gigabyte's is an awesome one, but the question is whether gryphon's is crappy or not. I really don't want to put on my headphones and hear noise or radio, what is the current standard on these new Realtek, is this normal?

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Do you need mATX or can it be ATX as well? If it can be ATX I would check out the MSI Z87-GD65 ; Still the same realtek sound chip but they put a little more work in the electronic components, also a great overclocker for your K CPU. Forget the "gaming" and "Killer NIC" bull MSI put's on it, it's just for looks ;). If you want good headphone sound, still get a special soundcard for that.

Only con with that board is that it consumer 10W more, idle and under load, compared with other brands.

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