Windows Vista to XP

[PapaBear]

A friend of mine at work has got fed up with Vista and wants to change to XP. I Have agreed to go around and do it for him as I have reinstalled XP a few times and am happy doing it. But does anyone know of any problems to be expected?

Also he wants to get his own copy of XP, mine will now only work for me and wont let any other machines with it on get the updates. Does anyone know where best to look for a cheap copy? and what is the the OEM version and is it suitable?

Thanks in advance

[John_C]

Originally Posted by PapaBear

A friend of mine at work has got fed up with Vista and wants to change to XP. I Have agreed to go around and do it for him as I have reinstalled XP a few times and am happy doing it. But does anyone know of any problems to be expected?

Also he wants to get his own copy of XP, mine will now only work for me and wont let any other machines with it on get the updates. Does anyone know where best to look for a cheap copy? and what is the the OEM version and is it suitable?

Thanks in advance

How new is there PC and copy of Vista?

I know a number of PC manufactureres were forced last year to take off / or offer buyers the choice of XP or vista. If its quite new they might provide a swap?

[Bardo]

The biggest problem you'll encounter trying to install XP onto a recent Vista machine is that if it uses a SATA hard drive then the XP installer won't recognise it. Fact is, XP is not SATA compatible and so you'll need to track down XP SATA drivers appropriate to your mate's machine. If it's a laptop, it probably won't have a floppy disc drive either which means that even if you do have the drivers, you'll have no way of feeding them to XP during the initial install process.

I had this problem when I switched my Vista laptop to XP recently. I did, however, find a solution. What I ended up doing was to use a use a program called nLite to shoehorn the SATA drivers onto an XP install CD (copied to HD) which I then cut to CDR. After doing this, it worked a treat!

nLite can be downloaded here...

nLite - Deployment Tool for the bootable Unattended Windows installation

[RobA]

Originally Posted by PapaBear

Also he wants to get his own copy of XP, mine will now only work for me and wont let any other machines with it on get the updates. Does anyone know where best to look for a cheap copy? and what is the the OEM version and is it suitable?

Thanks in advance

You can get an OEM Version of XP from Dabs.com for around £54.70. OEM Versions are typically those supplied to manufacturers, retailers get around this by either selling or including an arbitary piece of hardware.

OEM Versions are a "clean install" so you will need to remove all other operating systems from the Hard drive. Easiest way to do this is a Format!

Rob