One last thing

[Labyrinthine]

My Force 3551 showed up today. Well worth the wait, it's quite a sexy piece of machinery.

One little problem, though. The driver disc which came with it is only for Vista and I'm running XP. The 'Install Driver' button is not functional and when I try to manually install the drivers from CD I get a Vista related error message.

If this were a desktop, I'd just track down the drivers individually and install them. Considering this is a laptop, I'm not sure if that will work. Don't laptops usually require fairly device specific drivers?

Anywho.

Anyone have a solution?

[Justin@XoticPC]

I would suggest "exploring" the CD and you will see there are XP Drivers on there also. The Driver CD's include Drivers for both XP and Vista.

[Labyrinthine]

Nope.

There is only a vista32 and vista64 folder. Apart from that it's just the manual, NIS2008, and some free programs.

File tree looks like this

http://www.avalanche.org/~judd1/disk.gif

[Zatara214]

Well I remember the first thing I tried when I tried to put XP on my old F3SA: use google lol. There was an entire guide on how to do it, driver download links included. I'm sure that through Windows Update, you'll be able to find a lot of the drivers that you NEED (as long as you have a LAN or wireless driver already installed that is), and after that, you can search google for things like the fingerprint reader, card reader, etc. The only ones you really need to have immediately are the internet (for WU) and the chipset, and even the chipset can probably be downloaded later. WU will provide you with most of what you need... at least it did for me.

[Labyrinthine]

Well, I'm sure I could use WU to get drivers necessary to make the device functional. I'd rather not, though. It'd be nice to have the device fully functional with all the drivers.

It doesn't look like MSI lists drivers for their barebone laptops, is there someplace on the MSI site that has drivers for the 1651? The GX620 looks like it might have been built off something similar to the 1651.

[Brad@XoticPC]

Hi Labyrinthine - I think some of the Vista 32 drivers should work in XP as well. We don't really offer support for user OS installs (for obvious reasons :-) - but Zatara is definitely pointing you down the right track. As a helpful hint, it would be a good idea to make sure that the INF update for the chipset is downloaded (from Intel, presumably) and installed before anything else. Also, laptopvideo2go.com is usually a great place to get drivers w/ modded INF files to make them work on your computer.

Hope this helps you out. Best of luck!

[Labyrinthine]

Called MSI and they gave me a nice FTP link to XP drivers. I'm assuming they all work, they're all here, and they are for the right version of the 1651.

I'll report back on whether they do or not.

Not sure if I can legally give the link to the drivers as FTP did require login or mirror them.

[Zatara214]

Thats a little stupid, why would they require a login, what are they a secret lol... whatever, I'm sure they have their reasons (*cough* paid off by MS *cough*)