I'll admit it -- I gave up on Vista. It seemed like every 20 minutes the extra loud fan on my Gateway M-6824 would start whirring, and I was super-annoyed by the two-step flow to the Task Manager. (I hated the obviously tacked-on User Access Control, but that was quickly turned off). After the jump, a touch more whining about Vista and how to install XP on a M-6824.

I don't need to spend memory on things being pretty -- give me that option, Vista. I don't care what anything looks like if I'm not currently working on it. Heck, Microsoft, I never even needed the XP theming, much less the new concepts you've come up for Vista (which can be filed under "Prettier, but not better"). All I need is proper browser rendering, and -- if possible -- good color calibration. That's it. No transparent windows or a fancy 'Expose' style ALT-TAB.

Taking the M-6824 back to XP is unfortunately not straightforward. You can't simply drop in an XP CD and expect it all to work. This is because the M-6824 has a SATA drive which XP installers do not recognize (which, I should mention, has also been a huge issue with many Linux installers). Although this is cumbersome to fix, it's not terrible -- the solution is well documented on the web.

The truly difficult task is finding the proper drivers once XP has been installed. Gateway has provided all of ONE XP driver for the m6824. That driver is the SATA driver discussed below. I do not recommend buying a Gateway notebook if you want to run XP, as they obviously care little about providing choices for their customer. See below for a step-by-step accounting of my battle with this infuriating little machine.

1. GET XP INSTALLED:
Download NLite here and follow the instructions here. For a M-6824, the SATA drivers you need are (for the moment) here. When you get to the NLite screen which asks you to select/highlight a particular driver, simply highlight all the Mobile versions. I'm not sure which one is correct, but my install has gone OK simply by selecting them all.

2. GET NETWORK:
This should always be your first step when trying to acquire all the drivers for a computer. USB mass storage drivers aren't included, so any missing network drivers have to either be slipstreamed with NLite (which I didn't do), or burned onto CD and then installed. If the m6824 is your only computer you MUST slipstream them, or you'll be unable to get any software onto the computer, because no network connection is found with the stock XP install. Gateway does not provide an XP driver for the m6824 onboard LAN. After downloading the Gateway Vista LAN driver, it's clear that the included hardware is the RealTek PCIe LAN 10/100 Ethernet driver, whose XP driver you can find here (I grabbed the full auto-install, it worked). Now I still need a ton of other drivers, including the correct XP wireless, video and audio drivers, which I've yet to find. Yes, it is incredibly frustrating that Gateway does not outright provide these drivers. I'm guessing that F-key and other onboard control support will be zero. Great job, Gateway.

3. GET VIDEO:
The Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT does not have drivers on the ATI site, and the Gateway site only provides Vista drivers. Apparently, this kind of collusion between laptop manufacturers and ATI is quite common, and fortunately for us, common enough that someone has built a solution to get around it. Mobility Modder is an application that will modify the desktop Radeon drivers so that they will work on your laptop (that's right, it's a simple mod that ATI *could* easily provide but doesn't). Download Mobility Modder here and follow the instructions carefully. I modified the full install (with the Catalyst Control panel) for the Windows XP 32-bit Radeon 2400 XT (PCIe). For now, that driver is here. Really amazing work by the driver heaven guys. Thanks!

4. GET USB:
The m6824 uses the GM965 Express Chipset. Intel 'hid' drivers for this chipset here. They DO NOT appear on the GM965 Express driver page! The drivers on that page are a 'developer-only' set -- on my computer this 'dev-only' driver failed to properly configure the USB ports.

5. GET WIRELESS:
After googling the HWID (found from the Device Manager inspector), I managed to track down the type of wireless card in the m6824. It is a Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG. The drivers can be downloaded from Intel's site here.

6. GET AUDIO:
I spent at least 4 solid hours on this. I'm still not exactly sure what sequence will permit you to get audio working flawlessly, but at least you know it CAN be done. Hang in there, tiger. Here's what I think I did:

1. Download the Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for HD here.. Also download this driver from Gateway (the aptly named D00758-001-001.exe). Extract it to the CABS dir but do not run the install.
2. After installing this, XP should pick up a ton of things attached to your audio bus, including your modem (untested, but I've no need for it). In my case, it tried to install the IDT HD Audio Codec. It also installed an ATI Audio Driver, which I assume works with the HDMI output (but not the laptop speakers).
3. The real step three is me repeatedly downloading and trying to install every single Sigmatel driver I could find on the internet, but what you probably want to do is this: Uninstall the IDT Codec if present. Uninstall the ATI Audio Driver if present. Reboot.
4. After rebooting, XP should find the ATI Audio Driver again, and an Audio Device. Don't let it search for drivers by itself, instead, select a location and point it at the \cabs\D00758-001-001\WDM. If this completes successfully, you should now see an additional playback device in your Sounds And Audio Devices control panel called 'Sigmatel Audio'. Select this device and hit apply.
5. Rejoice, for you have just stuck it to the man.

7: ODDS AND ENDS:
There's three 'leftover' Unknown Devices in my Device Manager. Common wisdom on the internet seems to think these are devices used specifically by Vista for power management, etc. I'm not going to worry about them.

Total time to install XP? Probably around ... 10 hours. 10 hours of completely wasted time, since driver compatibility problems are different every single time. Hopefully this post has meant this effort was not completely useless.

Oh, and XP on this thing? Well, so far, it *flies*. I haven't heard that fan crank up all day.

UPDATE: So I've been running XP on this monster for almost a month now, with few issues. To my surprise, almost all of the Fn keys and dedicated keys (including the volume touch-strip and metal Play/Pause/Stop buttons) work. I'm assuming the ones that do not (brightness, bluetooth, 'music', 'dvd') only fail because they aren't properly bound. Responsiveness feels better, and the fan *definitely* comes on less often. I haven't tested HDMI out yet, but vga out works fine. Now I just need to set up a linux partition.