Question : HP only has drivers for Vista, downgraded to XP.

Hi guys, I have a friend who uses his computer heavily for music production and he just picked up a HP Pavilion that came preloaded with Vista, so I installed XP so he could dual boot and use Pissta.. er.. Vista for his daily web browsing and XP for his actual work. However the site doesn't provide XP drivers for his computer. Seeing this I got the specs on the MB and tracked down the drivers for the onboard sound and video however I cant find something to use for the onboard NIC. Any ideas where I could pick one up? He has a Pavilion a6400z.. at the moment I can't be exactly sure but it's a Pavilion aXXXX, they all should use the same onboard NIC though I'm thinking. I'll get the exact model later. Does anyone have any idea where I would find the other XP drivers for this rig? Especially the onboard NIC?

Answer : HP only has drivers for Vista, downgraded to XP.

" ... why is this such a headache. " => Good question.  The answer is simply that the OEM's are following Microsoft's lead in only providing Vista support, so it's difficult to find drivers (and in some cases with the newer hardware XP drivers haven't even been developed -- although that's not the case here).

HP, for example, has removed ALL Win9X drivers for their printers, scanners, etc. from their web site => so if you have an older HP printer or scanner and need to reinstall Windows 98 or ME you'd better have the drivers !!

... in any event, the Realtek driver above should be the right driver for this system.