In the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s Gericom released various laptop models and was fairly popular in western Europe. These laptops were sold under the brands Gericom (mainly Germany), Advent (mainly in the UK and Ireland) and in Spain under a brand named Hundyx. (I’ve restored one Pentium III model of this brand a while back. Funnily enough I really can’t seem to find a lot about this brand name at all) This is probably not an exhaustive list, but this is what I encountered over my years repairing vintage (or just plain old) hardware.
This Gericom X5-Force 1830 DVD/CDRW built in 2002 came to me with the following specs:
– 14.1″ TFT
– Intel Pentium 4 Mobile CPU 1.80GHz
– 128MB RAM
– Nvidia GeForce4 420 Go 32M
– 30GB HDD
Since the HDD already made strange ticking noises and it took over 5 minutes before the Windows XP boot logo even appeared, before giving a BSOD on the harddisk, I decided to replace it with a 128GB mSATA SSD plugged into a 44PIN PATA/IDE SSD HDD adapter, since I had this laying around anyway from a previous failed laptop restore. Further specs on this laptop can be found here.
The reason for this post is mainly to make it easier for people to find the drivers for unrecognised devices within Windows XP x32 SP3 for this system.
Windows XP RTM installs easily on this system and without errors, but, as is usual with XP, some drivers are missing. Also, these are not included in any of the Service-Packs, neither the official SP3 nor the unofficial SP4 and End-of-Service Rollup. (There are boot issues with this model and the End-of-Service rollup package. Since I’m not connecting this OS to the internet, I will not install this) It has taken me some time to gather these as it’s not too easy to find anymore. I doubt these are the latest available versions, but these install properly and do the job.
The below is simply in alphabetical order. This does not mean the installation has to be done in this order. In fact, I would recommend to install each driver separately, leaving the OEM Port I/O driver for last, and reboot in between installations.
Of course I would NOT recommend connecting any unsupported Operating System version to the internet. Please download the drivers below onto a pen-drive and copy these over to the laptop that way.
Unrecognised devices:
Multimedia Audio Controller – PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3059 = VIA AC’97 Enhanced Audio Controller
PCI Simple Communications Controller – PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3068 = Motorola SM56 Data Fax Modem
Universal Serial Bus (USB Controller – PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3104 = VIA USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller (It’s strongly recommended to have Windows XP SP1 installed. Finding the supportive USB driver files is going to be a bit of a pain otherwise)
Unknown device – ACPI\PNP030F = OEM Port I/O Driver (Note: Make sure you complete the full installation including the additional software. Windows may not start otherwise)
Unknown device – ACPI\VIA3076 = VIA Fast Infrared Controller
Video Controller (VGA Compatible) – PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0176 = NVIDIA GeFroce4 420 Go 32M (I advise to run the setup.exe to install the driver instead of right-clicking the device in the Device Manager and install from there. I observed some strange white-screen flickering when installing from the Device Manager)
Enjoy!