Installing Win XP Pro on D830?

Hi I'm considering purchasing a refurbished D830 from DFS. At the moment none of the machines have an OS loaded. What sort of problems might I encounter if I purchase a retail Win XP Professional package? Will I have to download drivers from Dell anyway? What about Dell Diagnostic software? From what I've read (here) Dell loads diagnostic tools into a separate HDD partition...

Thanks for any all information!

 

You shouldn't really have any problems with a retail XP package. You just have to activate it... as you would with any machine on which you install retail XP. You will need to download drivers from Dell, but the D830 XP drivers have been out for a while and should be pretty mature. Even when I had a D830 a year and a half ago, I didn't have any problems with the XP drivers.

Dell does load a bootable diagnostics partition on their factory images, but it's really not the end of the world if you don't have it.