Most probably after the OS installation, the system will not recognize some of your hardware components and in the device manager tab, you will see something like this:

Device Manager Window

Don't panic. We are going to solve this problem.

Windows XP Professional x64 Edition requires the installation of 64-Bit drivers only. You cannot install 32-Bit drivers. There are some device drivers that have been modified to allow installation of 64-Bit and 32-Bit drivers from the same .inf file. This is necessary to avoid installing wrong drivers under the wrong platform.

When installing drivers for the Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, be sure that the provider says that the driver works on “Windows XP Professional x64 Edition” and not on the “Microsoft Windows XP” or “Windows XP Professional”.
Some users will probably remember a time when Windows 2000 had exactly the same problem after their initial release when the operating system didn’t recognize a whole lot of hardware. We have already mentioned our list of companies that have released drivers for their products which is also posted in our forums. Click here to see the full list.

You must install drivers in the following order, in order to install the drivers correctly and to avoid conflicts with other drivers. After any install you make, it is recommended you restart your computer.

1. Motherboard Drivers
2. Graphic Card Drivers
3. Sound Card Drivers
4. Any other device drivers

Driver Installation procedure

After the driver installation, we are ready to test our system. In the next page you will find information about the computer that we used to run all the tests on and what programs we used.