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I guess I am not the only person that recently got my hands on a Toshiba notebook Satellite A135-SP 4796 and I also immediately ran into problems with it and its Spanish version of Windows Vista.

This laptop was purchased by a friend of mine and since I am at IT pro, I decided to fix it up for her. The laptop must have been build for sale South America, maybe Argentina or Uruguay. I see many posts in spanish and they are from those domains. So I guess this Laptop is not made in the US.  But I had no idea how this was going to become a nightmare.  So far I have spent 10 hours looking for drivers.

What had happened was the following: The laptop had Spanish Vista and the wireless was not working so my friend asked me to fix it. So since I am not a fan of Vista or any new OS that are resourse hogs and also it was a Home edition. So I pulled out my windows XP CD and started to run setup. I have found that Windows XP still works much better that Windows Vista, unless you have installed lots of Memory and a Super CPU. But this Laptop does not have that. I do not know why Miscrosoft and Toshiba insists on forcing people to use Windows Vista that was preinstalled. With Vista it took this machine about 5 minutes to boot up, and it would take ages to just open any explorer window.

This Laptop was obviously not designed for windows Vista! but Toshiba is probably afraid of messing with the Big “M” Microsoft tm.  

So now that I had re formatted the hard drive for XP I ran into a new problem and that is that there were no drivers to be found. Windows XP only installed a few basic drivers, but it left the Wireless Card, VGA and Ethernet card without a driver.

So as usual, I searched the web for the missing XP drivers and that is when I found out that Toshiba only has Vista drivers and furthermore, as I searched the web, many users are complaining about the same thing. Now it was too late to tell my friend to take back this piece of junk and return it to whoever sold it to her.. But I wish i would have done so. Now I spent many hours researching the web and found very few links that showed XP drivers for Toshiba.

But we want to have XP drivers.  So I had to keep searching little by little until I found some of them.

I also learned from some forums, that if you call Toshiba, they will tell you that they will not support XP and hang up. I am not sure if that is true, but who knows!

But the drivers are out there and after many long hours I did find them.

I found the wireless driver  on the Aleros web site. In my case it was Atheros AR2425

DOWNLOAD ATHEROS DRIVER HERE:

They have an XP driver!!! So why doesn’t Toshiba? Well I guess I know which brand I will

not buy the next time I am shopping!

I also found a driver pack for a simular model: a135-s2276 and after I unzipped this file I found the video driver and a few others.  Please note that the video driver was actually located in one of the mobile intel(r) 945GM chipset subfolders, so you will have to search one by one until windows XP accepts it!

The video driver works fine and in Device manager it will show Mobile Intel(r) 945 GM Express Chipset 2 times.

Now I am working on the Audio.  I do not see a yellow exclamation in device manager, but if I go into Control Panel Sounds, excery option is greyed out. If anybody has had success, please let me know. 

DOWNLOAD Other Toshiba A135 Drivers here: