Windows Vista Vista to XP Pro Downgrade

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ksmarks

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I have a Dell Studio 17 which came preinstalled with Vista Home Premium. I detest Vista and purchased a copy of XP Professional; however the computer repeatedly crashes about five minutes into the installation. Dell Support offered no solution. From what I've been able to ascertain, Microsoft will not allow a downgrade to XP unless Vista Business is installed. How can I successfully install XP Pro onto my laptop?

Any suggestions will be appreciated!!
 
Don't downgrade, do a fresh install.

Boot from your XP CD, when given the option format hard disk to NTFS, XP should install.

That's how it works on a normal computer anyway, but you have a Dell, that may not work, you may need the Dell recovery disk which means you're stuck with Vista.

And if you were going to change from Vista (which is a bit crap, I'll agree) you should have gone for Win 7, it's good, and XP is about ten years old and outmoded now.
 
Vista to XP

I did attempt a clean install by booting from the CD, but each time the computer crashed. A free upgrade to Windows 7 was available when I purchased the laptop but I was unaware that there was a limited time in which to take advantage of it and kept putting it off. I just still can't figure out why I can't successfully perform a clean install of XP Pro.....I've not ever had this issue with any other computer. And while I know XP is out-of-date, I find I prefer it more than Windows 7.....I have another laptop with Windows 7 installed and it behaves a little too much like Vista in my opinion.

Thanks for the response.....any other suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
 
I would agree with floppbootsstomp that if you can afford to upgrade to Windows 7 I would do so. But if not use dban or Bartpe to do a full reformat you hard drive then reinstall of XP but remember XP is now an old OS 10 years old rather like the difference between Windows 95 and XP and will not be supported much longer by Microsoft, and if you do not have a copy of XP with Service Pack 2 you will not be able to down load any of the updates now anyway.
 
Last edited:
ksmarks said:
I did attempt a clean install by booting from the CD, but each time the computer crashed. A free upgrade to Windows 7 was available when I purchased the laptop but I was unaware that there was a limited time in which to take advantage of it and kept putting it off. I just still can't figure out why I can't successfully perform a clean install of XP Pro.....I've not ever had this issue with any other computer. And while I know XP is out-of-date, I find I prefer it more than Windows 7.....I have another laptop with Windows 7 installed and it behaves a little too much like Vista in my opinion.

Thanks for the response.....any other suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

i had this problem with xp on my toshiba laptop

kept crashing all the time even after a clean install

went into the bios and change my harddrive and it work
 
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