“Technically” Advanced

HP Pavilion dv6871us Windows XP Drivers

Recently I purchased a new laptop, an HP Pavilion DV6871. Quite powerful, Core2Duo Processor, 3GB RAM, 320GB Hard Drive, Geforce 8400GS… not a bad machine, with one exception – it came along with Windows Vista. As I couldn’t stand Windows Vista, I eventually began searching hard for drivers for this thing, as Windows XP drivers are quite lacking on HP’s website, which was terribly disappointing. Well, I’m writing this in Windows XP with all drivers successfully installed, a mashup of HP’s official drivers, HP drivers taken from different laptop models (HP Business Laptops 6710b and 6910), and vendor specific drivers both completely supported and some not supported at all (the nVidia drivers required a special INF file to install).

The driver list to run XP on the HP Pavilion dv6871 is as follows: (you can modify this for the 683x series as well, just go get Intel’s GMA drivers from intel.com).

• Intel ICH8M SATA Boot Driver
• Intel ICH8 Chipset Drivers
• Microsoft UAA Patch (HP Systems Only)
• Realtek HD Audio
• nVidia ForceWare 175.63 (Unsupported INF Included)
• Realtek RTL8139/810x Fast Ethernet NIC
• Intel 4965AGN Wi-Fi Drivers
• Motorola SM56 Modem
• Ricoh Multi-Card Reader
• HP QuickLaunch Buttons
• LightScribe Host Driver

The only caveat I’ve discovered at this point: I have a Linksys Wireless-N router, 802.11n worked just fine in Windows Vista. This is NOT the case in XP. I had to set the router to be 802.11b/g only for the wireless card to work right. Just a heads-up.

Past that caveat – I’m noticing a lot better performance in general, XP is running great and I couldn’t be happier. Now if only HP would release these drivers to the public.