Need wireless driver help for HP A6700F w/WinXP Pro

Hi all

I've chucked the Vista that was installed on my HP A6700f system and installed Win XP Pro-SP2. Poor planning saw me learn only later that HP doesn't offer drivers or otherwise support that PC outside of Vista.

A friend got my ethernet running and then I muddled through the audio driver update. Stuck on enabling the built in wireless now. Originally, if I brought up Windows Media Player, it would tell me I had a problem with the Audio card, or that one wasn't present.

I googled around and believe the wireless is:
> PCI Realtek RTL8201N 10/100Mbps

and used the driver found here below

> ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/softwar...-1/sp34975.exe

but it reports "Your system does not meet the minimum requirements for this update. Update has been cancelled. (9995)"

(The above is reported in a pop window labeled "Summer 2006 Original Liteon Wireless Lan Driver")

Anyone know of a better driver or procedure?

thanks
roger

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :wave

I checked with the Realtek site and they don't support the 8201N chip, which really doesn't matter because the wifi isn't controlled by a Realtek chip anyway. It uses a Ralink chip. I found this out by downloading the Vista drivers from HP, extracting the INF file from the driver and looking through it for a PID number. I found it. The chip used is the RT73 series, which is actually part of the USB 2573 series, or the 257x series. At this point, I'm sure you don't care LOL So, click on this direct link and the download dialog will open. It's a fairly large driver file (about 37mb) and may take a few minutes 'cuz Ralink is in Taiwan and they have slow servers....
Good luck! Let us know how it goes!

[dlb]
:-D

 

Hi, Roger. This isn't a reply to your post, I just wanted to ask you how you like the Pavilion A6700f. They're on sale at Office Depot this week for $450 and that seems ridiculously low, so I'm wondering what the catch is. I haven't been able to find any reviews on this particular model. I checked out the demo at the store and there seemed to be a buzzing sound coming from the power supply area. That kinda bothered me. Does your's do that? Is there anything else I should know?

 

@dlb

Excellent, and thanks so much. You're right, servers are slow, so I'm off to my workshop and will check it out later. It IS actually interesting, even if, as a nearly pure hardware
EE, the driver business and extraction procedure are well above my pay grade. I'll def let you know what I find, and thanks for the help and the welcome.

 

@ddage.

Mine is quieter than a mouse (both the clicker and squeaker/meatspace types)
I bought it at the same place for the same price. It's a KILLER deal for a name brand system, though in my case, the blowing away Vista and adding XP negates much of that benefit. Otherwise, only catch is the reason I'm here; no easy XP support from HP. They have only Vista bits on their site so you're on your own.

I'd rate it as a 9 or 10 for value, depending on whether you're going to, respectively, move it to XP, or leave it as a Vista box.

hth
roger

 

Thanks again dlb. The wireless driver you pointed me to works great.
I installed the first time and told the setup util to use Windows wireless manager, and it didn't connect. I reinstalled and chose the 'use Ralink wireless manager' and it wall worked perfectly. Thanks much dlb

 

:highfive Glad I could help! :-D

 

I've got this machine and it's decent. I upgraded the video card (GeForce GTS 250) and PSU (465W) and I'm running Bioshock and Crysis @ 1280x1024 on fairly high settings. Good computer for the money, particularly running Windows 7. Probably not worth more than $600 though.