It seems that nearly all new laptops come with MS Vista installed. The computer-savvy folks I know are saying this is not a good choice. I have a valid copy of XP Pro (with installation DVD), so I’d like to use that.
But I’m getting conflicting reports on just how easy it is to “downgrade” from Vista to XP. One argument is that the Vista device drivers (e.g. for video card and touchpad) won’t necessarily work with XP.
Has anyone done this? How did it go for you?
I hate to be the guy to get all “my os is better than yours”… I tried hard to make things work.
But, after six months of dealing with a never ending problem on this machine, I gave up hardcore and went from Vista to Ubuntu 7.10. Wine picks up the slack, and everyone’s happy now.
It’s true that Vista device drivers (especially for the 64-bit editions) may not work on XP. However, I’d be very, very surprised to find a device today that has a Vista driver but not an XP one – given the astoundingly poor reviews and uptake levels of Vista, that would be shooting yourself in the foot. XP drivers for all your devices will exist, they just may not be the same as the Vista one, and you’ll have to download them separately.
Before doing ANY whole-system re-install, be sure to download and burn to CD the network drivers for the operating system you’re going TO. Anything else you can download yourself (and Windows update will do many of them itself), but you can’t do that unless you can get to the network.
I concur, but would like to add that you may need a driver for the disk drive or interface (e.g., a Dell laptop that needs an XP driver for the SATA interface that talks to the boot drive, my nephew had that kind of issue with downgrading, according his father). Trying to install XP without your boot drive wouldn’t be very successful.
My sysop suggested that I spring for a new hard drive and install XP (of which I just bought a valid copy) on it. When I expressed doubt about changing the hard drive on a laptop, he said it was a piece of cake. When I expressed doubt, he offerred to do it for me. I will take him up on it. If it turns out badly, I will go back, reluctantly, to Vista.
I am thoroughly disgusted with Vista. The search program seems totally broken. When I searched for a file that I knew perfectly well was there, it stopped immediately on a file not found. It had obviously done no searching. When I wanted to install a program that had been copied to a CD, the instractions were to run the setup program on the CD. Vista showed some 1441 files, IIRC, but not the setup program. Doing a dir from the command prompt showed 1442 files, including setup.exe. From the command prompt, the setup worked fine.
It won’t let me do this, won’t let me do that, even when I disabled some of the security. Just a mess.