New Dell PC and Vista - Can I go back to XP?

[GW]

After 4 months of fighting Vista Home Premium, I am done. Have you gone back
to XP and do you have any regrets?

 

[DL]

I have a Dell with Vista Business - no problems
Perhaps you might want to post what problems you have

 

[Malke]

After 4 months of fighting Vista Home Premium, I am done. Have you gone
back to XP and do you have any regrets?

General information about replacing Vista with XP:

A. On an OEM (HP, Sony, Dell etc.) computer:

1. Go to the OEM's website and look for XP drivers for your specific model
computer. If there are no XP drivers, then you can't install XP. End of
story. If there are drivers, download them and store on a CD-R or USB
thumbdrive; you'll need them after you install XP.

2. Check with the OEM - either from their tech support website or by calling
them - to see if you will void your warranty if you do this. If you will
void the warranty, you make the decision.

3. If the OEM does support XP on the machine, call them and see if you can
have downgrade rights and have them send you an XP restore disk. This will
be far the easiest and best way of getting XP on the machine.

4. If XP is supported on the machine but the OEM doesn't have an XP restore
disk for you, understand that you'll need to purchase a retail copy of XP
from your favorite online or brick/mortar store.

5. Also understand that you will need to do a clean install of XP so if you
have any data you want, back it up first.

6. If none of the above is applicable to you because you can't run XP on
that machine (see Item #1 above), return the computer and purchase one
running XP instead.

Malke

 

[C.B.]

After 4 months of fighting Vista Home Premium, I am done. Have you gone
back
to XP and do you have any regrets?

I purchased a new Dell with Vista Home Premium preinstalled as soon as
Vista was released to the public. I never had any problems with it and
learning Vista after having used XP for years was simple. I then purchased a
retail upgrade to Ultimate and have no problems using it.
I think Vista is superior to XP in almost every way. I still have XP on
three other systems but rarely turn them on. I have no regrets whatsoever.
If you are having problems you should post them one at a time and
someone will be more than happy to help you overcome them.

C.B.

 

[Synapse Syndrome]

For me, going back to XP after running Vista for 18 months is like going
from XP back to 98. XP is ancient and it shows.

Like going from XP back to 98?

That is indicative of complete ignorance. Is it all about GUIs for you or
something?

ss.

 

[Not Me]

Some of us understand it and make it work just fine, we just don't LIKE the
way it works.
My Toshiba with OEM Vista Home Premium laptop works much better with XP than
it ever did with Vista.
After a couple months with both, I killed the dual boot and erased Vista
entirely from it.

 

[GW]

I can't get DVD Maker to encode and burn .AVI files created by my Casio
digital camera. This pushed me off the Vista edge recently. I tried to
create a dvd with one .avi and it sits there are 0% progress for hours with
no movement....

T

 

[zachd [MSFT]]

What codecs does the camera use? I'm not familiar with the Casio digital
camera. Most other digital camera manufacturers that were producing AVI
used a shared library that had a "strange" implementation that broke a rule
of AVI parsing in Vista RTM. That rule was relaxed in Vista Service Pack 1
(out now) so that those clips would work now. But there's not a lot to go
on here, so I'm hesitant to associate the two. If that *was* the case, the
clips wouldn't have produced sound when played. If that *wasn't* the case,
I'd love to look at a sample clip.