about formating with vista

[Guest]

i have bought a new dell laptop and it came with windows vista and i really
dont like the vista could anyone tell me how to format my laptop to get a xp
home edition on it please

 

[Guest]

If you have a copy of XP, when you boot from your CD Drive with the XP disk
in it, the disk contains everything to install XP.
Follow the prompts, and it will delete the Vista partition, formatt the Hard
Drive, and install XP.

 

[Guest]

Also, check with Dell. Some posters here have mentioned about contacting them
to organise a disk

 

[Guest]

what i get when i try with the xp disk is

Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer

but yet vista was working :-|

 

[Jane C]

Hi Christian,

You will need to obtain the XP drivers for your hard drive controller.
These should be available on the Dell website. They will need to be on a
floppy disk. Follow the instructions for creating the floppy. Insert the
floppy disk when you see the message at the bottom of the install screen
"Press F6 to load...drivers". When you get to the stage of choosing hard
disk/partition to install to, you will need to delete the partition, then
create and format a new partition on the disk.

What model is your laptop? Please be aware that some manufacturers are not
being forthcoming with XP drivers for some of their recent models, so do
check first. Also note that the Dell warranty will likely not cover you in
the case of serious problems. They would expect the laptop to be in the
state that you received it, ie with Vista installed, before assisting you.

May I ask what it is about Vista that you don't like?

 

[Guest]

thx

my laptop is a dell inspiron 1720

and i really dont like it because of all the security on it it makes
everything go way slower i am used to use xp and when i got this laptop i was
gonna ship it back cuz of vista my old laptop that is a bit smaller but as xp
is way faster i did not want to buy a slower laptop

 

[Paul Randall]

The Vista license has downgrade rights generally, meaning that your license
for
Vista can possibly be converted into an XP license. I've seen links to
Microsoft that describe downgrade rights posted in various Vista newsgroups.
You don't have to buy the OS you want to install -- MS gives you a key for
it and you have to hunt down a copy of the installation CD. You can't use
both your current Vista key and the downgrade key. Google for it.

Make sure your computer can use WXP or whatever OS you downgrade to. HP
provides only Vista drivers for my desktop and claims that the BIOS was
optimized for Vista and may not support earlier OSs. DOS works fine,
though, as I was able to use the DOS version of Norton Ghost to get an image
of the SATA hard drive before I booted the computer, and I have successfully
restored that image a number of time, although I had to use another piece of
software to copy and restore the MBR.

-Paul Randall

 

[Guest]

Would you mind telling me how he is going to put a floppy into his laptop!