XP Pro, ACPI, Laptop

[axslinger]

Greets,

I recently attempted to upgrade an HP ZE1230 Pavilion laptop from XP Home to Pro. Ran in to problems right off the bat. It didn't like the HAL. It was trying to load halacpi.dll and said it couldn't and setup couldn't continue. Wonderful. So I elected to install the "generic" HAL by hitting F7 at the message to press F6 to load third-party drivers. No problem. But now, in my device manager, I don't have a Processor Device, which is necessary to enable the AMD PowerNow! feature. In fact, none of the normal power management features work.

The BIOS on this thing is scant. There are options to select the boot device and that's it!

So, according to a tech doc I found, I attempted to replace the existing HAL with an ACPI hal. Didn't work. It hung during the boot up. I figured no big deal. Went into the repair console but it wouldn't accept the Administrator password I was giving it! And I KNOW I was using the right password. Is there a trick to getting these laptops to properly load XP Pro? Any tips?

 

[bcastner]

The only way to safely change the power model used by the computer is through the function key trick in installation. Whoever advised you to use safe mode to do so is misinformed, it is almost assured of rendering your machine unable to start windows.

If the BIOS does not support any advanced power features, and HP does not provide a driver to add these features, then I think you are out of luck. Re-install Windows using the Function key trick and chose the single processor Standard PC model.

If after this you look at Power Options in Control Panel and do not see a PM tab you have done everything you can. You did check I hope to see if there was a BIOS upgrade?

Best.