This is for all of you who figured the Acer Aspire 5315-2153 (which comes packaged with Vista) would make a great Windows XP Professional notebook, for only $348 + the cost of windows… and then realized you had problems.
   
There are two methods for getting this to work, one only requires the internet, a few minutes, and a CD burner. The other requires a USB floppy drive.
UPDATE: We’ve got a working modem driver now. Check out the tutorial on getting it up and running (should be installed last).
You’ll probably also need a USB thumb drive for either method, and of course your copy of WinXP.
You may have already tried to install WinXP on this notebook. With the BIOS set to it’s defaults, the WinXP install disk can’t even see it’s Hard Drive, and if you set the hard drive to a non AHCI mode in the BIOS (such as native emulation), you are increasing your risk of data corruption, and at the same time reducing your speed.
These two methods are the correct way to handle the situation, and result in no performance compromises.
NOTE: All data on the hard drive will be erased.

If you experience problems related to .DLL files, try DLLCentral.com for resources and downloads.

The Floppy Method

First we’ll explain the floppy method, as it’s the fastest if you’ve already got the floppy drive and a blank floppy.
Download the floppy creator from here: f6_floppy_maker.zip
Extract the executable from the zip archive, insert a blank floppy, and run the executable, following the prompts to