Hi David,

Off-hand, I can’t think of any reasons why this wouldn’t work.  It is possible that on a new motherboard there is some hardware that the manufacturer no longer is providing Win XP drivers for, but I would think that it is a small chance at this time.  While Asus might not provide Win XP drivers on their web site, I would think that you could use Device Manager, or perhaps some hardware inventory utility, to get the hardware information of what you would need to find drivers for and hunt them up on the web.

With Windows 7 already installed, you will run into the problem of the Win XP boot loader not recognizing Win 7 (the newer OS); so, you’ll need some way to correct that after installing XP.  Although it should be possible to fix the Win 7 boot loader manually, I followed the advice on this web page, http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html , and used the EasyBCD utility to get this set up.  (I’d removed my Win XP drive from a system before I installed Win 7 on another hard drive in it.  Later, I decided to re-install the Win XP drive for a dual boot arrangement and used the information in the above tutorial to get it working.)

I hope this is helpful.  If you have a second hard drive to use for the Win XP install, you don’t have to mess with repartitioning a working drive and can take a “try it and see approach”.  If the result isn’t satisfactory, going back to where you were shouldn’t  take too much effort, then.

John Sproule

Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:12:05 -0700
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Agony of Defeat

I'm continuing to have problems getting my wife's new computer to do
any of the things she wants it to. It's an ASUS CSM-series tower with
an i5 or i7 CPU and nVidia video card. It came with 64-bit Windows 7
Home Premium pre-installed, which appears to be a major complicating
factor.

At this point, I'm kind of looking to salvage value from our
investment and hopefully wind up with something that can actually do
what she needs it to.

An option that occurred to me last night is to partition the hard
drive and install Windows XP and/or Ubuntu. That assumes, of course,
that I can find the necessary drivers from ASUS and nVidia, but will the
CPU have any problem running a 32-bit OS? Is there anything else I need
to watch out for?

(Yes, this is the machine I wanted Brother HL-630 drivers for. Thanks
to all who tried to help, but I've not managed to get any of the offered
solutions to work. That's one of the reasons for considering this
alternative....)

David Gillett

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