Let me go through everything I've done to this so far. I'm sure I must have done SOMETHING wrong, but I have no idea what.

I went through the installation process of putting XP on a new Vista machine as described on this forum. I then hit the snag many others seem to have hit: It didn't notice the HD due to the SATA system.

I went to the BIOS and attempted to disable the SATA system temporarily. I instead changed the controller for it from AHCI to IDE. I was then allowed to install XP professional from the CD on the 10 GB space I set up on the D: drive for it. Obviously nothing worked, since XP had no drivers.

My computer is an Acer Aspire 7720-6569, so I went to this location:

http://www.acerpanam.com/flex/.....N=45067055

found my model and downloaded everything from the list that had "XP" in the description at the bottom, put it on a flash drive and ran everything. On restart, my computer looked much nicer, probably because of Intel Graphics Accelerator working great.

A few programs were installed; a launch manager and near as I can tell 2-4 instances of the "Acer Crystal Eye Webcam," two of which are in my start menu, one on my desktop. Clicking on the desktop causes windows to inform me "Camera not found!" as does clicking on one instance of "crystal eye webcam" The other opens the program that should work as a webcam and shows a black screen. However, if you go into My Computer, under "Scanners and Cameras" a "USB video device" is listed that shows the camera working just fine and allows me to take a picture.

Aside from the launch manager, the mysterious webcam, the graphics, and perhaps many other invisible changes (I also had to find files for Realtek High Definition Audio because it had a ! in the device manager, but that's fixed now), nothing else was different, except there was an internet connection listed that wasn't there before that supposedly doesn't work. No wireless, as I should have and as worked in Vista.

The two connections in Device Manager are, under network adapters, a 1394 Net Adapter (firewire?) that is asking for a tcp/ip (I don't think I want this one) and the other is Broadcom Netlink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet, which is asking to be plugged in ("Network cable unplugged".)

So naturally, I went back to the drivers and saw that the reason that might be is because the only broadcom download listed was for Vista, so of course I didn't take that one. I went to broadcom's site and took these files:

b57win32.cat
b57win32.inf
b57xp32.sys

and had the new hardware wizard find them and install them, which seemed to go without a hitch, but when I came back from restart nothing at all had changed. No wireless is even listed as nonexistent.

I was asked what my question marks are on device manager when I asked my friends for help. Under "Other devices" there is a question mark with an exclamation point over it, and it says "Network Controller".

I should also note. When trying to switch my SATA back to AHCI after installing whatever drivers I installed, I'm told that due to some change, windows can't start normally and I'm asked if I want to start in any strange way. If I say I want windows to start normally, it shows the XP loading screen, goes black and restarts until I switch it back to IDE. Then it asks me all that, I tell it to start as normal, and it's just normal.

How can I get my new laptop online?