Actually it's kinda strange cause it is win xp era laptop, so it should work out of the box. But honestly I never tried installing clean win xp, I'm using custom distro with SATA drivers included. As for 4gb ram you need modded bios from Alienware model. I'll share it later

Indeed, it was originally sold with XP, so I was also expecting it to work flawlessly. Maybe I will try some custom distro too. I am usually careful with such non official os versions, but it should be fine since I am going to use the laptop offline anyway.

Thank you in advance for sharing the BIOS. It will be certainly very helpful.

I know HP's of this era modified the included XP disc to include the SATA drivers, so can imagine so did the other big OEM's
It's how I first learnt of the SATA issue while trying to re-install XP on someone's laptop at the time so knew it was supported.

You can always create your own "clean" XP CD with just the sata drivers using nlite, that's what I do.

My retro laptops are an Acer Ferrari 3200 and a Dell Precision M6600.

The Ferrari 3200 runs an Athlon 64-M 3000+, 512MB of ram and a mobility radeon 9700. Decent 4:3 15" screen and speakers. Runs win98 just fine alltough it was designed for XP. Great for early 3d accelerated games. Can even play some dos games under win98 dosbox.

The Precision M6600 comes with a 2nd gen Core i7 (2820qm), 16gb of ddr3, a Quadro 4000M (witch is basically a lower clocked desktop Geforce GTX 460) and a gorgeous 16:9 LCD. It has official support for windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and unofficial support for windows 10. I run XP SP3 x86 and Tiny windows 10 on it. Great for any XP era game that supports widescreen resolutions.

I also have Precision M6600 in my collection. It's a great "high-end XP era" laptop and you can even put 4 HDDs or SSDs inside. I have a triple boot configuration on mine: Windows 11, Windows xp and Linux, but I mainly use it for 2005-2012 games with XP.