
I thought it would be fun to get an old laptop to see what could be done with it, and I picked up a tidy T400.
The main idea was to install Win XP (SP3) on it to run some old software that won’t run on Win 7.
The problems... The SD card reader and GPS, and a few uninstalled devices left in Control Panel / Device Manager.
GPS would be nice, but it’s mainly the card reader that I’d like to work, as it is already built in, and flush. The GPS would just be a nice icing not he cake.
USB card readers of course do work, but that’s just another thing dangling from it, and I have to carry a reader and cable between computers to transfer anything.
This is also to be a clean computer, and has no virus checker, and has never had any of the networking devices enabled, although those did install correctly.
I’m getting all drivers from here: https://download.lenovo.com/eol/index.html
Some devices didn’t work until XP Service Pack 3 was installed, such as the audio driver, but the main stuff is going fine now.
So left in Device manager are two “Unknown Devices”, and a “PCI Serial Port”, which is interesting, as I see no external hardware serial port.
The most I’ve got the media card reader to do is having Windows make the correct insert and remove sounds when a card is inserted and removed,
but it’s not doing that at the moment, and when it was, the card was still not recognised.
Under “Disk Drives” in device Manager, the SD Card came up when inserted, but had the yellow exclamation mark with it, and didn’t work.
I have spent the last few days reading about similar problems with both devices, but have found no solution, and wondering if this is known by now.
Cheers, Art.