Talk about Laptops

Even with all the Vista marketing .. we at myshop encounter a *lot* of clients who almost hate Vista & want XP. And for obvious reason .. people have gotten comfortable with the interface & most of all .. they know that their set of programs work on XP whereas they might encounter problems with Vista. So the question is .. is downgrading your system from Vista to XP simple & straight forward. Unfortunately, not in the case of laptops at least.

To start with, you may not be able to install XP on your system to start with. Since installing XP on some of the systems require that you provide the additional SATA driver either through floppy drive, or by slipstreaming it into your XP installation CD. Once you’ve successfully installed XP though, the next quest is to find the drivers for the devices in your laptop .. which may not be available.

So before you start installing Vista, make sure you do the following

• Create the Recovery Discs set, if applicable.
• Take snapshot of your devices through device manager in Vista (this would help you find drivers for XP later).
• Take backup of your data.
• DO NOT remove the Recovery Partition when installing XP (typically a partition of approximately 10 GB).

Following these precautions help you safe guard your Vista installation, in case your XP installation does not work out as expected, as well as having the provision of installing Vista in future.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 5:23 am and is filed under Tweaks & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.