Vista on a Laptop

[Skyguy]

Hi, I'm asking this for a friend of mine.

She got a laptop a while back with Vista pre-installed and so far, she says, it's been nothing but a huge pain in her a$$. She was wondering if it is 'safe' to wipe her HD and install XP instead?

I told her that it probably isn't a good idea since manufactures usually tailor the OS to the laptop's specific harware setup... but she said her anger grows with every cr@ppy fix update she has to download. Fixes which seem only to spawn more system problems.

[nightwolf]

the thing you would have to look for would be divers for xp , if there are none then shes stuck.

[zirian]

Once she has found all drivers for her laptop, then she can use the program kill disk, which wipes out every data possible from the Hard Drive

[SPARKY]

It's for her own use, Kill Disk is overkill, the XP disk will format it just fine.

You said a while back, if were talking 2 or more years finding drivers and some apps shouldn't be a problem. If it's newer it could be.

[Skyguy]

Thanks guys. She'll be happy to know all hope isn't quite gone yet.

[Mr. Apollo]

One thing to keep in mind is that she'll loses tech support for her laptop. If she calls for tech support the first thing they'll tell is is to wipe her HD and then reinstall Vista and then to call them back.

[batkinson001]

how is she having probs with vista? i have no issues whatsoever on my laptop. Then again I got ultimate with mine, haven't tried the other flavours.

[Mr. Apollo]

how is she having probs with vista? i have no issues whatsoever on my laptop. Then again I got ultimate with mine, haven't tried the other flavours.I don't have any issues with my Toshiba or LG that are running Home Premium.

[Omnios]

Some things to look into.

Some laptops have small partitions with stuff specificly for the laptop. Will wiping these small partitions affect the laptop.

I found a program called nLite that allows you to use a hard drive image of you XP cd and do a lot of things with it. First you can add all the service packs to it.

The best part of this program is that you can get the drivers for her laptop and put them on the XP CD.

It also makes a boot image so you can copy it to the cd and acts as normal install CD.

The best part of this is she ends up with a updated XP backup CD

[sclerozo]

On an episode of the Lab Leo Laporte discussed this issue.

What you can do is make a second partition on your HDD. Install XP Pro (The new and improved Windows OS) on the second partition. When you boot up it will not recognize Vista so to get it recognized this is where vistabootpro.org comes in and gives you a choice of OS at boot-up.

[DazedNConfuzed]

Some laptops have small partitions with stuff specificly for the laptop. Will wiping these small partitions affect the laptop.



yes, as they are typically recovery partitions.

and to the average user, they only know this option to recover their PC since operating system discs are never provided.