Railfan Technology > switching back to xp from vista

anybody know how difficult it is to wipe out vista on my laptop and install xp??? any tips or suggestions. vista has been a pain with msts and all the add-ons to the point msts won't even load anymore. thanks for any input..........

66

Are you trying to save any data? If not, place the XP cd in the drive and restart. It will ask you at some point if you would like to delete the partion with Vista, say yes and it will reformat and install a new xp.

This is something I think came up before and excuse me if this off base but don't you have to have a computer that will run XP. I think it came up before that some new systems are just not designed for that and certainly not supported if they were never sold with XP.

So if you try to do it you are on your own. My understanding is Dell's can be ordered with XP.

Bob

"Designed" means that they will provide drivers for the hardware. I have installed Vista on a machine that was designed for XP, no problems. I have also installed a clean XP on a machine that came with Vista...with one driver problem, which was easily corrected after a quick search online. It is not so much that is will "not work" as it is the hardware manufacturer will provide the proper drivers.

goneon66 Wrote:
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> anybody know how difficult it is to wipe out vista
> on my laptop and install xp??? any tips or
> suggestions. vista has been a pain with msts and
> all the add-ons to the point msts won't even load
> anymore. thanks for any input..........
>
> 66

Before you attempt this, go to the laptop manufactor's website and 1) see if downgrading to XP is supported and b) see if all the hardware drivers are there for XP.

I recently bought a Dell Vostro laptop which I ordered with XP. Go to the Dell web site and it will tell you which computers can be ordered with XP. BTW. The Vostro line is for business buyers and it doesn't have all the garbage that hits you when you boot the system up with home computers.

Hal

jst3751 Wrote:
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>
> Before you attempt this, go to the laptop
> manufactor's website and 1) see if downgrading to
> XP is supported and b) see if all the hardware
> drivers are there for XP.


What he said. Some integrated motherboards don't have XP drivers - I've worked on some HP computers like this.

JAC

Obviously I am not guranteeing anything....but I have been able to make vista drivers work on xp when that is all the manufacturer lists. Also, if the manufacturer does not list the driver, you can go directly to the chipset maker and get the drivers. For example, even though it is a dell pc, intel or some other made the shipset for various chips like nic, etc.

Ditto above comments. Make sure you have XP drivers for all hardware -- LAN, Wi-Fi, graphics, sound, touchpad, for starters. Then you need to look into things like PCI/IDE bus drivers, USB, etc., etc. Is there a flash card reader built in? What motherboard does it have? If there is/are driver(s) for the motherboard, make sure some are available for XP too. You may have to go to the motherboard manufacturer website for them. If your graphics card is NVidia, you may not find an XP version listed at the laptop manufacturer's site, but you can probably get one directly from the NVidia website. You have to scrounge around a bit and do some sleuthing. They may not want to admit that they have a driver that supports XP for a particular piece of hardware. The graphics is the most common one for this kind of thing.

Now if you had a Mac...............

engine3420 Wrote:
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> Now if you had a Mac...............

.....you'd simply have a different set of problems.

The only real solution is a technically sophisticated teenage son or daughter.

John West

At work I basically tell anyone who wants to take a Vista computer back to XP to get someone who is really really (emphasis on saying it twice) computer savvy to do it for them. It can be done, but as has been posted there's a lot of bases to cover with it.

If you're trying to switch an HP/Compaq laptop back to XP, trust me, it can be a pain. HP officially tells you not to do it, that it won't work and that it isn't supported. The fact I'm writing this post right now is proof to the contrary. But it isn't easy - you wind up rounding up drivers from a lot of places, reading all sorts of discussion forum posts trying to figure out what your hardware bits are and what's worked for other folk, and then piece-mealing the whole thing together. I normally can reload one of my machines in under three hours, but this latest laptop took me the better part of a day. Bought it about noon, and didn't have everything quite working right under XP until almost midnight.I'm told the Intel-based models are easier, due to most of the drivers being available from Intel directly. The AMD units, like mine, are a little trickier.

Nathan

My current PC's are all running XP, and doing just fine. Is there any good reason to "upgrade" to Vista? Or perhaps I should say do the advantages of Vista outweight the problems. I'm guessing that Vista will at somepoint become the standard, but are we there yet, or are we still just doing quality control for Microsoft.

JBW

jbwest Wrote:
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> Is there any good reason to "upgrade" to Vista?

No.


> Or perhaps I should say do the advantages of Vista outweight the problems.

You'd have to find an advantage for this question to be valid. So far, no one has found any, unless you consider a slower computer, making interfaces more complex for no reason, etc., advantages.


> I'm guessing that Vista will at somepoint become the standard, but are we there yet, or are we still just doing quality control for Microsoft.

Actually, it appears that Vista will die a pretty quick death. "Windows 7" (Vista's successor) has been accelerated, and a Beta is due out 2Q08. In the meantime, stick with XP.

JAC

johnacraft Wrote:
> Actually, it appears that Vista will die a pretty
> quick death. "Windows 7" (Vista's successor) has
> been accelerated, and a Beta is due out 2Q08. In
> the meantime, stick with XP.


I dont know if any of you remember....but when XP came out 7 years ago it was almost identical to the "hype" surrounding Vista right now. Noboday said it would last, it took too many resources...on and on. Look what happened. I have no doubt Vista will last just fine...especially when hardware catches up to it, just as with XP. And for those of you that say there are no "real" upgrade advantages to going with Vista, better read some more about it. It is more than just a pretty interface. I have been using Vista for a better part of 2 years now, I was a BETA tester before it was ever released. I for one welcome the user security control, I think it will save me a lot of work as far as fixing computers for people that "accidently" clicked on something and killed their pc.

BNSF9647 Wrote:
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> I dont know if any of you remember....but when XP
> came out 7 years ago it was almost identical to
> the "hype" surrounding Vista right now. Noboday
> said it would last, it took too many
> resources...on and on. Look what happened. I
> have no doubt Vista will last just
> fine...especially when hardware catches up to it,
> just as with XP. And for those of you that say
> there are no "real" upgrade advantages to going
> with Vista, better read some more about it. It is
> more than just a pretty interface.


The big difference is that the corporate customers adopted XP relatively quickly. They aren't adopting Vista, no matter how hard Microsoft is trying to sell it.

Another difference is that the manufacturers promptly stopped selling 98/ME - Dell (the no. 1 manufacturer) is still offering XP, and in fact is offering XP where it previously offered only Vista, because customers are demanding it.

No, the reaction to Vista is very different to that of XP.

JAC

johnacraft Wrote:
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> The big difference is that the corporate customers
> adopted XP relatively quickly. They aren't
> adopting Vista, no matter how hard Microsoft is
> trying to sell it.


I was in corporate then and I am now....believe me, at least where I was and am now, no one was in a hurry to adopt xp and no one is in a hurry to adopt vista. Windows 2000 pro was a main stay, it worked very well, no one was replacing it. And no, I am not going to switch to vista at work anytime too soon, not because vista will not handle things, because there are too many third party apps that are not ready. I like Vista...and I think it will make a go eventually. For my personal stuff, it works great, and I think personal computers should have it. Someone buying a new pc should have vista...but probably not worth paying for an upgrade on an existing computer. Business, not yet...too many unknowns for than environment, but it will come. I would like a Mac at home too...but it does not do some things I want to do...and it costs way more than I am willing to pay.

In the end, who really cares what you use, as long as it does what you want it to! I know some farmers that I still help with their computers that are still running Windows 3.1!!! The software was made for it, and everything works just like they want it to. They have no reason to upgrade, it works. I use vista on my computers because it does what I want it to do. I use Server 2003 and XP at work because it does what I want it to do. As soon as I see the need to do something more, I will look at upgrading.

I couldn't wait to upgrade to XP. I was running 98 after trying ME, which was a disaster as far as I was concerned.
I really like XP. It's been the most stable OS of any that I have used so far. I haven't even looked at anything running Vista just because I really don't want the hassle of upgrading. Vista is too expensive as I can put that money to better use, buying models or Frisco stuff :^p

XP Professional I hope...otherwise I wouldn't bother.

At my house right now:
My son has Sony desktop system that dual-boots XP Professional and Ubuntu Linux 7.10
My wife has a Toshiba laptop that runs XP Home
My daughter has a slightly newer Toshiba laptop that came with Vista pre-installed
My main desktop system runs Windows 2000 (and I see no reason to change...it came with a one-time option to install XP Pro or Windows 2000)
I have another desktop system with XP Pro and a server running Ubuntu 7.10
I also have an identical laptop to my wife's Toshiba that runs Ubuntu 7.10 and
a Thinkpad T43 running XP Pro.

The most troublesome system is without doubt my wife's XP Home laptop. My daughter has no
problems with Vista. Of course I'm the tech. support guy (though my son is learning fast.)

...John Reay, Bowmanville, ON