Vista won't work on corporate intranet, need XP

[Pamela G]

I have two Vista laptops, that we are finally getting stable after many
tweaks. My husband however *needs* a new laptop with XP on it as his
corporate intranet server will *not* connect with anything else (yes, we and
his whole IT department have tried). Those are getting very hard to find,
obviously, and are very expensive when we do find one. I do have a retail
copy of XP Pro available. Local retailers are selling some inexpensive
laptops that would work nicely if they didn't have Vista on them. So my
questions basically are: is it worth it to buy a laptop which comes with a
basic Vista OS, wipe it and do a clean install of XP Pro? I am not worried
about voiding a warrantee in this case. Or if it works better, can my XP
software be installed as a backwards "upgrade" over Vista Home? Just trying
to work out the best route here.

Thanks
Pamela

 

[benedito78]

Time for the company to send the IT department back to school.

If these laptops are fairly new, contact the manufacturer and find out if
they will send you a "downgrade" to XP, and save your own copy for another
machine. I know Lenovo does this. You are probably best served with a
fresh install of XP. I don't think you can downgrade Vista to XP

-Lou

 

[usasma]

There are several "tricks" to make Vista work with incompatible network
hardware. I have a local ISP that has this same issue and we've managed to
fix several systems in order to make it work.

The most common thing is to disable the DHCP Broadcast Flag for each network
adaptor, then next thing is to disable IPv6, and then disable the IP Helper
service.

That being said, the toughest thing in downgrading to XP is finding
compatible hardware drivers. Most new computers were designed for Vista - so
you'll have to do some searching for XP compatible drivers. If the drivers
aren't available, then that piece of hardware just won't work.

- John

 

[h1247]

Here's what I did. I have a laptop that had a fully functioning XP Prof
(SP2). It was installed on the original H/D that came with the system (a 30Gb
HD). I upgraded my laptop to 2Gb RAM, and also purchased a 120Gb HD. Onto
that HD I installed Vista, and left my XP untouched on the other HD. It's a
really, really simple process to remove and replace your laptop HD. It does
NOT take a "geek" to do this. Now I'm happy, in that, if Vista does not want
to act "right", can remove the HD from my laptop, and put the old one back in
and keep right on going!!!!!

 

[Pamela G]

The corporate intranet is the Veterans Administration Hospital system, and
they refuse to upgrade or tweak their servers until Vista is less
troublesome. It is the same with my eldest daughter's corporation, and
several others I have heard of. I know we could get a native XP business
laptop from Lenovo as this is a more common problem than many know. But they
are in the $2500+ range. And local companies are selling basic Vista
machines right now for $4-600.

My daughter was able to get her company to provide her with a laptop already
configured. The US Government is not so generous since some very sensitive
laptops were stolen a couple of years ago. So when my DH travels, he needs
his own that can hook into the VA intranet and not download sensitive files
onto the hard drive. Any other ideas?

Pamela

 

[Harlan]

DELL has laptops in that price range pre-loaded with xp.