Downgrading hubby’s laptop from Ubuntu to XP. Knew it was inevitable, but still. Sad. Sadder still, I kept getting the dreaded “Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer” error, as apparently even in SP3 XP install CD’s don’t comprendo SATA drives¹. There’s a fix for that, using a program called nLite to create a custom install disk with drivers specific to your hardware… if the manufacturer has made available XP drivers for your hardware. Naturally, no such drivers exist for this hardware. Twats. Fortunately the motherboard manufacturer is not quite so stupid², and you can set it to emulate IDE to the operating system. Not sure what sort of issues I’m going to run into down the road on that one, but at least I can, bare minimum, get an OS onto the hardware. Well, something not totally dissimilar to an OS, anyway.

¹ I fucking hate Windows.
² And Acer.