I recently bought a new HP dv9339 notebook PC with Vista Home pre-installed. There's tons to hate about Vista, but I do acknowledge that it's probably what I'll want to use for some applications (if not all, eventually). With that in mind, I created a new partition, turned off SATA support (necessary for installing XP), and installed XP Pro.
Since HP doesn't support XP any more, I had to search for a lot of the drivers I needed, but I installed them one by one (except for my audio drivers and USB drivers), and soon I had a pretty functional version of XP running. For about two days. Then, out of the blue and not related to any changes as far as I could see, I got a IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL BSOD. When I turned my computer back on, the motherboard gave me a series of angry beeps and the monitor failed to turn on. I gave it a rest, tried again, and got a message saying that "E:\Windows\System\System32\" was missing or corrupted (E was the XP partition I'd created). the weird thing is, after I reformatted E and reinstalled XP on it, these problems remained (MOST of the time; occasionally I could boot into XP just fine).
Luckily, Circuit City has a great return policy (no questions asked) so I got a fresh one. I'm just running Vista on it right now, and I'm scared to try XP again. I'm wondering if these problems were a hardware issue (in which case I don't care, I've got a new computer), or something I did by installing XP--and if it's an XP problem, is there any way for me to install XP on this machine without killing it?
