The best place to search for drivers for your hardware is at the manufacturer’s support website. Note: If you chose to create an ISO, make sure to use the “Make ISO” button before you click Next.Īt this point you can burn the ISO image to a CD, and then start your XP installation process. You can choose to directly burn the cd here, or you can select Create Image to create an ISO file that you can burn to a CD using whatever burning tool you have. Once you proceed to the next screen, now we can finally finish the process.
I would recommend including both Storage and Network drivers, as those are the most common drivers that are missing in XP. Just be careful not to select a 64-bit driver if you are using 32-bit, or the wrong OS version. If you don’t know which exact one it is, you can either use Device Manager in Vista to find the exact model, or you can just select all of them. NLite will prompt you to select your driver. Note that it doesn’t really matter which of the *.inf files you choose, because it will select all files in the folder anyway.
Since we’ll just be loading a single driver, you can choose that option, but you might want to first read the section below about finding drivers for XP.īrowse to the directory where you extracted the driver files, and then select Open. If you click the Insert button, you can choose between adding a single driver or adding a folder of drivers. Hit the next button until you get to the screen for selecting drivers. nLite will let you bundle updates, set tweaks or automatically remove components from the installation, but that all goes beyond the scope of this article. Side note: You can select any of the other options if you’d like. Select “Drivers” and then “Bootable ISO”. Hit the next button until you come to this screen, where you can select what options you want. When it’s done, you’ll see all the information on which version it is. NLite will copy all the necessary files off the XP installation and into the temporary folder. I chose to create a new directory and called it XPISO, but you can put it wherever you’d like. Next you’ll be prompted on where you want to save the temporary files used during the slip-streaming process. Find it and select the root of the installation, and then click OK to go to the next dialog.
First you’ll be prompted for the “Windows installation”, which really means your XP install CD.