trying to install win xp on inspiron 1526, please help! major pita!

[matty8199]

my friend just bought an inspiron 1526 at best buy, and while it's an awesome machine overall, it came with the garbage that is vista installed on it.

naturally, my first task was to wipe the drive and put xp pro on it. however, i am running into several major issues. i was able to find video drivers, but am having very little success finding drivers for anything else.

dell support was useless, which was surprising to me as i've got several dell machines and they've always been very helpful in the past...all they have to say on this is that "there are no xp drivers available for that machine at all" and then follow it up by contradicting themselves with "if you want to have xp installed on this machine, you need to contact best buy"

in addition - the machine has a 250gb hard drive installed. xp is only recognizing it as 140gb, it did so during setup and it is continuing to do so now. even in the disk management tool within control panel, it says there is only one disk at roughly 140gb of space on the disk.

i am stuck. i don't want to have to tell him to take the machine back, but i'll do that if it's necessary...i don't understand why going backwards from vista to xp is such a pain, but thus is my situation and i'm in need of help...any help would be greatly appreciated.