To All,
I recently purchased this item whilst working in Japan and upon returning to the UK to install WIN XP Pro in english, I was faced with a number of driver problems as I had not backed up the pre-installed drivers asssuming they would be readily available on the Toshiba website.
According to Toshiba, this model is only supported in Asia, which as a multi million dollar business supplying pc's to the world, I found annoying.
Not to be put off I started a number of problem solving tasks.
Win XP pro in itself will find the majority of the drivers anyway but you will find you are left with the video, bluetooth (if installed), modem and several other mainboard drivers still to install.
I installed service packs 1 AND 2. SP2 contained most of the drivers needed so I was just left with modem and bluetooth.
But, I noticed that my display had changed, I ended up with a black block to the right of the screen and upon a 'google' search, I found out that microsoft have admitted that the driver update in SP2 is not compatible ! (Come on Bill Gates! If you're gona have us by the short 'n' curlies then at least get it right!)
The display adapter is a Geforce4 420 Go, but again, the driver for Gforce from the Nvidia site didn't work as it wasn't listed on the 18MB download.
But I noticed that a helpful guy on driverguide.com has uploaded the correct one. Look for Nvidia, Geforce4 420, Toshiba, XP.
I then had no idea what internal modem I had, so I had a guess! Whilst spending hours hunting the internet for a clue, I noticed that a Toshiba 9000 or SE2100 seemed to have the same spec. I downloaded the drivers for these models and it worked!! I made this assumption because I thought that a global company wouldn't just issue components to certain parts of the world or range. It would duplicate what components are used within its product list of the time.It isn't financially viable otherwise I would have thought.
I'm not suggesting that your particular model will have the same success but I have been unable to find anything on any forums in english (not japanese) that was any help so I have posted this in case it can help.
If you get really stuck my email is :
edccomms@hotmail.com and if you need further help, then I'll try to point you in the right direction.
There's something seriously wrong with the computer industry if it takes a community to pool knowledge just to get their products working correctly!!
Any feedback with success or failure of the above would be appreciated.