Downgrade Vista to XP on 5610

I just downgraded my window vista to XP. what a great feeling !

You can pretty much get all of the drivers from the acer website to support the WideScreen video driver and the LAN driver as well. However, the acer website is posting the incorrect wireless LAN driver so you need to get this from the ftp site.

ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/

you can locate the file "Wireless Lan Driver 802bg Atheros Ver.4.10.40.0"

 

Lots of people seem to be doing this now...looks like Vista is going to have wait for a while to work out the compatibility issues.

 

At the moment I wouldn't refer to this as a "downgrade"

Purely due to compatibility issues. If they had made vista backwards compatible with all XP drivers these could be used temporarily.

They could have included a browser that listed all hardware that was running of an XP driver, so you could always check up which hardware still needs vista drivers, then you could periodically check for new ones online and update once a vista driver is released for your hardware.
This would mean less compatibility issues...

Of course in a sense that would mean vista would have to be able to emulate XP and Vista is a complete re-write from XP and a lot different than most people think, so maybe it's not possible.

Either it's not possible or Microsoft didn't think of that, I'd say its the first one though and not possible to do it.

 

i recently upgraded my xp to vista. all the drivers work. the only things that don't are the games. prey didnt work, nor America's army among others. The only driver issue i'm having is that Vista refuses to recognize my x1100, instead reading it as x200. this isn't affecting performance too much.

 

I am not too fussed about Vista yet. When I do get it I will probably disable the Aero Graphics and go with a basic 2D interface like XP or the Windows classic possibly. Can you make it look like XP or just "Windows classic"???

I will upgrade in about a Year, maybe slightly earlier when the bugs are all worked out but not for the graphical update...Some people may say "whats the point" but the graphical side of thing is just to attract none techie PC users.

 

Is it best to do a low level format before installing XP?

Is the CD that was included(with my 3680-2022) all I need to go back to Vista later or do I have to make an image of the drive with Acronis or Ghost or something?

 

I personnally installed Vista on another partition, so my laptop can run on one or the other os. I still have some problems with some drivers on vista (orbicam i.e.) but as I still can use XP, I take my time to find solutions. And for gaming, as Vista can't equal xp in my opinion (lot of ram used by os, system protection...), I continue gaming on XP. I think I will finally use XP for gaming, P2P... and Vista for applications as OpenOffice or for surfing the web. My experience will tell me on which os it's more interresting to run an app. Of course my documents and saves are stored in a 3rd partition, accessible from both os. Still searching a good solution to hide/protect Vista partition when working on XP and vice versa...

 

You can switch to a "Basic" mode which looks the same but hasn't got the Aero 3D flip thing, no transparency and no live-thumbnail down at the taskbar and YES, the classic mode is still available!

 

Wow what an unusable POS Vista is.I wish I had bought the laptop a few weeks earlier so I could have gotten XP.Having Vista as the only OS drops the value of this PC by the cost of whatever copy of XP you install.
So although I got the laptop for $399 after a rebate you have to add in another $100 to get the true cost.

 

Oh yeah, it's one of the first things I did after I got my 5100-3949 from CircuitCity when it was on sale. I ordered a 120GB Western Digital sata notebook drive and slapped XP on there. Vista is nice and all, but still buggy, game support is shoddy, takes up a lot of hdd space and uses a lot of memory. And with the backup partition taking up so much room, the 80gigger didn't have a whole lot of space left for mp3s and videos. So, a very quick drive swap and voila! Xp installed quickly, the drivers are all there on the site and installed with no problems. Even with all the songs, videos, software and windows installed, I still have over 83 gigs of space left. Plus, I can always put the 80 gigger back in there and tinker with Vista if I want.

Next up is a cpu upgrade to dual core and 2gigs of ram to help with the games.

Side note: company of heroes works pretty smoothly with most of the settings turned down and still looks pretty good. This is on a single core 2.0ghz turion and 1gig ram with the ati 1100 chipset. Not bad at all. I'm sooo glad I paid a little more and got a decent video chipset, rather than that crappy Intel integrated crap.

 

I set mine up as a dual boot so I can at least get things doen while I play with Vista.I'm getting the impression that Home basic has all the annoyances and none of the benefits.

 

Can someone tell me how to boot from the cdrom on the aspire 5100? Vista is a totally different system than XP that I know nothing about....

Some post a guide, pm me or something...

 

I just bought a dell E1705, with windows vista . Having a problem installing americas army, Im getting (some files maybe Corrupted, please download a fresh copy) i have download it from 4 differents sites, and i still get the same thing. im sure it has something to do with windows vista, does anyone know whats going on?

 

You should post this problem on the gaming boards as you will get better help there than here.

 

Google it and you should be able to find it if available.

 

thanks well do

 

HELP, I have an Acer Aspire 9300 took the free upgrade to Vista Home Premium AND I HATE IT.....

Please help by letting me know how you downgraded from Vista to XP, is there a format involved, do I need the disk please help me I am desperate and about to murder my laptop......

 

It's more tricky to go XP if Vista is allready installed on your machine. It's a bit easier if XP is installed first. I did a project with my nephew to dual boot Vista and XP with a machine that already had XP on it. I downloaded a free partition manager called Gparted (Which is used alot in the Linux world) and created a second partition 20 gig. Gparted is a pretty nice program but it did take almost 4 hours to create the new partition. The only problem we had was when we installed Vista it made the Vista partition C and the larger XP partiton D. I had to copy and edit the file boot.ini to the D drive. Gparted had a tool to let me edit the boot.ini. I had to change a partition(1) to partition(2) in the boot.ini command line showing where XP Professional was located.

 

America's Army does not support Vista. I got it installed, and then it took forever updating punkbuster. after that, punkbuster kept on kicking me due to an incorrect OS issue.

 

seems i am not the only one with Vista issues....I keep losing items from the start menu....or the orbi cam will disappear from the menu....and programs I pin to the start menu are sometimes gone after a few days....sounds like a job for XP-Pro...

 

For those still wondering how to get your Acer OrbiCam - Logitech to work, I have searched the world over with far too many times failing to get my Aspire 5670 to recognize and work with its built-in webcam. But recently I was fortunate enough to finally find out that installing the latest drivers didn’t work at all whereas a particular old one worked well both on XP and Vista OS.

You should go to this link:
http://www.driverstock.com/Acer-Aspire-5670-driver-download/4-21-12877-94131/index.html

Download the zip file then save all contents in a folder that you will browse to use later.

Do not use the setup.exe from that folder. It won’t work… Just go to Device Manager and Uninstall your current driver of Acer OrbiCam. Then click, Update Driver, and point to the folder of those unzip files. Let it install then restart your computer.

When the computer restarts go to Skype or any communication/camera software you’re using and set the video camera. Voila, this time you will see the video coming on to the screen after about 10-15 seconds of black screen.

I have to thank that site for the download.

Last but not least, please remember that this one driver (version 9.4.0.1120) works very well on both XP and Vista… You don’t need to update it to any other higher version!

As for other Acer Aspire models, just check other pages from that website… I have no way of knowing since I only have my model. But I think you will be able to make use of your OrbiCam once again.

Best of Luck and Enjoy Video Chatting!

Numo

PS I think if you get only that driver file (version 9.4.0.1120) from the link after unzipping, please see whether putting only that driver in a new folder and install in Device Manager will get your camera to work too. If so, it will be nice for you to just upload that driver file and paste your link here so that others can just download this file and not all others from the link above.