replacing vista with xp

floydmoon1

have a copy of vista on my laptop.do i have to buy a copy of xp if i want to put it on or do i own a license of xp if i own vista.

yoyo

No, you don't own a license for xp, you own one for Vista only, seconded it should be possible to install xp on the laptop, provided you have access to all drivers available for stuff like sound, wiki, hotkeys etc... Also you may need to tinker around with SATA settings in the bios setting it to legacy or something for the xp install to work..

Nick

AlmightyCushion

If you have vista business or ultimate then you can downgrade that to xp. If not you'll have to buy a license.

floydmoon1

how do i downgrade

johnplayerblue

Don't downgrade, you've paid for vista so dual boot until such a time as vista does what you want to do and at the curret rate maybe a few yrs.

As said make sure you can get your hands on all drivers for your laptop and that they support xp. You should be ok but if you have HD Audio or HD HDMI output and the like you may have a long day, what machine have you got as these brand new gen of machines don't/won't even mention XP on there sites and your options in BIOS are very very limited and with no support for legacy.

Again as yoyo said SATA is gona be an issue before you can ever load XP. Your gona have to find the file/drivers for your SATA controller as XP dose'nt support it and wiil only go so far and tell you it can't find a H/D on your machine.

The good news is that once you know you have support for your laptop under XP with regard to chipset drivers etc etc and you get the SATA issue sorted it's just a matter of using Nlite or Win XP iso builder and porting in the SATA driver and building a new XP image from your orignal XP CD and burning the image and booting it in your laptop and your half way there.

Your gona need Vista_Recovery_Disc_x86 and a copy of EasyBCD which are all found from google and you will be able to dual boot. I've put hrs of work and reading in as little space as possible but it's worth the result, it's not gona work first time but after many attempts you will get there and by the end of the day you should be able to to dual boot with ease.

P.S. Make sure to have plenty of CD-Rs or even better a coupl CD-RWs.

beer enigma

Just check that your laptop will run with XP....

I tried a downgrade recently & found that because the laptop was fairly new, there were no drivers available for things such as audio etc.

Overheal

Aye I did the smart thing and contacted my customer support about downgrading - they warned me about driver compatibility issues I would encounter. So I've stuck with Vista through the bad times and to be honest it is getting improved upon all the time. Why would you downgrade? I have yet to encounter something I could not do in Vista that I could in XP (save use WMP 10 - that was a wonderful app)

It sounds like you've been listening to the bandwagon about this without doing the research. Most vista naysayers have never touched it and only quote from months old bugs that have since been fixed. Program compatibility is not an issue these days at the producers of those programs have created their own workarounds for operating within vista. Performance is not necessarily as raw as it is in XP but even in High Performance gaming benchmarks, the differences are (in my own opinion) too slight for me to give a damn. You're talking about maybe a 2% drop in game performance. Not to mention DirectX10 (the new graphics standard) will not be supported in XP.

And thats about the only bad thing I have to say about it.

As for going ahead with the downgrade theres a million and one sites on the topic. Just google it. To be honest though I think its pointless at this stage. I liked XP as much as the next guy but its on the way out.

lucernarian

Sorry for bumping the old thread...

I've battled with vista ultimate for 3 months over problems with reaction speed, various assortments of wifi issues with my Intel 3945 card which have still not gone even with the latest 11.5.0.32 drivers. As for trying to quickly check my status with being assigned an IP address, I've to go through a few clicks to check this, assuming Network centre didn't freeze.

I can't show up all programs at once within the start menu without going back to windows 9x style. I'm sick of this laptop loading up in about 4 minutes while a desktop with XP and similar specs loads up everything in about 45 seconds. The time it takes for it to go to standby is sometimes almost as quick as XP, sometimes 3x as slow.

Now the internet features and bluetooth support seems better in vista, but I can add to XP to get what I want, where I can't take out the IMO faulty bits of vista.


Now that's out of the way, can anyone tell me how I can get XP pro or indeed home on the laptop without having to pay a min of €90? I have Vista Ultimate OEM as it stands.

mukki

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

Sorry for bumping the old thread...

I've battled with vista ultimate for 3 months over problems with reaction speed, various assortments of wifi issues with my Intel 3945 card which have still not gone even with the latest 11.5.0.32 drivers. As for trying to quickly check my status with being assigned an IP address, I've to go through a few clicks to check this, assuming Network centre didn't freeze.

I can't show up all programs at once within the start menu without going back to windows 9x style. I'm sick of this laptop loading up in about 4 minutes while a desktop with XP and similar specs loads up everything in about 45 seconds. The time it takes for it to go to standby is sometimes almost as quick as XP, sometimes 3x as slow.

Now the internet features and bluetooth support seems better in vista, but I can add to XP to get what I want, where I can't take out the IMO faulty bits of vista.


Now that's out of the way, can anyone tell me how I can get XP pro or indeed home on the laptop without having to pay a min of €90? I have Vista Ultimate OEM as it stands.

you dont really need to turn your laptop off, just set it too s3 standy when you close the lid, that way you have instant off and on again when you open the lid, you only relly need to reboot when you update or install something

to find your ip, you could make a .bat file....

ipconfig /all
pause


to show more of the start menu programs, delete the ones you never use, and set the start menu to show more icons, should make it a lot bigger

Capt'n Midnight

Even if you have downgrade rights then you are on your own for support and media.

Your best bet is to borrow a manufacturers CD for your brand of PC. Ask someone who works in a big company as they should have plenty of OEM XP PRO cd's, SP2 if you can and check the web site for drivers first, expecially if using SATA drives and doubly especially if have a flash cache or similar on the drives.

lucernarian

Thanks for the posts guys. Food for thought there.

I think standby is great, but I'm on a college network usually and one has to go through 2 IP addresses, an authentication zone of sorts and then a working internal address to get to the internet. When I go out of standby, I lose my full IP address and Internet Explorer and Vista are pretty poor at handling this change. Even if DCHP is a little flaky in the college, there's nothing I'm going to be able to do to change that. It's 50/50 as to when waiting and clicking repair a few times or restarting the computer is quicker. Makes a quick resume pointless.

IPconfig nearly always takes around 2 minutes to load up in vista. Not really sure why. I think it stalls for a while on the wireless cxn. Sometimes it reports an IP address from the wireless back home, even if the wifi radio is disabled!!

I'll see what I can do about the XP SP2 thing. It seems like you need a concurrent XP PRO licence to use for the downgrade, which defeats the point of being able to revert back anyway:mad:

One other thing, there is a 1GB intel flash caching card in the laptop. Does this have consequences for a Vista downgrade?