Technology in terms you understand. Sign up for the Confident Computing newsletter for weekly solutions to make your life easier. Click here and get The Ask Leo! I bought a Gateway Laptop for my daughter, who is going overseas to study and do some type of research through her university. The laptop came with Windows Vista which is totally unfamiliar to her.
Am I going to have problems with drivers, signatures, or certifications? Become a Patron of Ask Leo! My first recommendation is actually to consider sticking with Windows Vista.
Other than that and some UI fluff and rearranging, Vista really is just an incremental change on top of XP. This will get you a working copy of Windows XP for the laptop. The problem, if you want to call it that, is that any manufacturer-specific drivers and software will not be included. Chances are your hardware will still operate, but some of the non-standard features may not be enabled. The good news here is that those drivers are typically still available from the manufacturer.
Switching from Vista to XP is considered a downgrade. That means that the Windows XP setup program will see that you have a newer version of Windows already on your machine. As a result it will refuse to overwrite it. That is, Vista is not removed and XP is installed separately.
You might even end up with dual-boot to allow you to choose at boot time which one you want. Even worse, switching between XP and Vista, if you choose to do so, may get confusing as configuration changes will need to be made in both places.
My recommendation is that you instead backup , reformat and reinstall from scratch. This will remove everything from your system hard disk , including Vista, all applications and data.
Reverting from Vista to XP is no small task. Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week. Most of the laptops we see coming into my office have a gig or less of RAM. Find the Disk Management item in the list and select that. Now you can choose the size that you want to shrink, which really means you are choosing the size that you want your XP partition to be.
I chose roughly 10gb by entering into the amount. Right-click on the cd-rom drive in the list and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths from the menu. Now we can create a new partition for XP to live on and make sure that the drive letter is set the way we want. Now you will need to close out of disk management and reboot your computer. Once you come to the screen where you can choose the partition to install on, then choose either the unpartitioned space or the new partition you created.
Update: VistaBootPro is no longer free, but you can still download the free version. NET 2. This will scan your computer and then automatically fill in the XP version.. Click the Apply Updates button and then reboot your computer… you should see your shiny new boot manager with both operating systems in the list!
Or screw up your files. If you have issues with using the shrink volume feature, check this article for some tips. Use Google Fonts in Word. Use FaceTime on Android Signal vs. Customize the Taskbar in Windows What Is svchost. Best Smartwatches. Best Gaming Laptops. Best Smart Displays. Best Home Security Systems. Best External Solid State Drives. Best Portable Chargers. Now right-click on the empty space created and click on New Simple Volume and create the partition with the right drive letter.
Boot using the XP installation CD and install it. You will then no longer be able to boot into Windows Vista. Now, Boot into XP and install a software called VistabootPrO which will allow you to make entries and changes to the boot record. I installed XP professional over Vista. I reformatted the hard drive and installed e fresh version of XP. Which include the ethernet adapter? It does not even let me enter the screen where I can choose to delete or create partitions on its hard drive;.
BSODs are a big pain. I suffered one recently. Try the procedure again. You can perform a clean install.
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