Okay well about a month ago I bought a new laptop which came with Windows Vista Home Premium. At first it was pretty cool, but now it is getting really annoying with all the glitches and such, and I would like to downgrade to Windows XP. I would like to know if there is any way I could do this without losing the files I've downloaded and the programs I've installed.. and if so, how? I don't really want to burn it all to a DVD.. In my Computer panel, it says there is one harddrive, the main drive, which I save most of my files on.. There is also one which is about 7gb big.. what would this be for? Could it be of any use?
ok firstly ive had vista for about 5 months and had no problems at all secendly no u carnt only way to do it is to boot from the xp disc from start up and install that way if your programs ARE legal u should have the discs any way files just put on a dvd or a speak hard drive etc that is a slave one if you do that they will stay
Put eveything, including drivers, onto an external hard drive, and then clean swipe your laptop by installing XP. Then you can re install / replace back your files.
Use vistas partition program and split your Hard drive in 2 parts. Im not sure how much but i think its about 11 or 12 MB GB Of space needed to install XP. Once you have done that you need to boot from the Windows XP CD Boot disk. Then it gives you options on which Partition you which to install it on, this is where naming the partitions in the vista partition program will help. Once you have installed that it will load up on vista if i remeber correctly this is where you download a Partition Manager such as VistaBootPro there is more info about that on there site. Once that is installed you can Boot up with both. WARNING - XP will not have any of your Graphics card sound card drivers E.t.c so you will need to download those from the Brand site ^_^. Overall it is really not worth it as i once felt like you hated vista and wanted nothing to do with it. But most of the errors you are finding will soon be sorted. Hope this helped. Also it might sound a bit stupid but if you type in on google , "How to install XP over Vista" , i had a few helpful links . -M1k3y
<span style="font-family:Comic Sans MS">When I finally said "fck Vista" and wanted to reinstall XP I backed up all my files and used "ERD Commander 2005" to COMPLETELY erase the HDD. After that I just reinstalled XP.</span>
Vista just annoys me.. like a lot of the time when I close the screen and then open it the screen will just go black, but the cursor will still show and the right click menus are sticking open and stuff. It's nothing major but it's all the little things that get me.
get a partition manaeger. i've always like gParted since ti's easy, free, and legal. partition the drive dedicating minimal space to the old vista partition then make antoehr partition for XP. Guaranteed 100% way of not loosing data due to the XP isntall. or you could just pop in the XP disc install as normal and opt NOT to erase vista.
Prebuilt computers are starting to just junk the old recovery disks and make a new partition as a back up and thats roughly 7-8GB... so thats probably whats happened to the drive
