Buy Dell and use old XP discs to downgrade?

Hi

I'm looking at buying a Dell. I already have an old Dell machine.

If I buy the Dell it will come with Vista Home Basic. Can I use my old Dell recovery discs to downgrade the laptop to XP Home?

Will there be any issues with drivers, etc?

Thanks!

 

It is not recommended.

these notebooks use OEM windows version, which is not transferable.

 

I doubt that you can do that unless you have a retail version of XP. If the old machine had xp preinstalled on it, it probably had and oem version and the license key would not be transferable.

 

Yea, changing it to XP can be a process. If you want to the best option would be to make sure and pick a notebook where dell has the xp drivers on their site. Then you can purchase or download the xp you want and use it.

 

Thanks guys.

Seems its more hassle than its worth.

 

It's not too bad...just make sure that the computer model that you buy was once shipped with XP, even if it isn't shipped with XP now.

 

Well, its the Inspiron 1525. I'm guessing that was always shipped with Vista, rather than XP.

 

Vista isn't that bad ...

 

I think you will like vista. Just reinstall it from the disk when you get it and it will run much better than it does from dell.

 

I have to agree with both of you. Vista has a bad reputation due to outdated info that people continue to repeat as well as outright lies people hear in Mac adds. Over 25% of crashes that occurred shortly after vista's launch were caused by faulty drivers from nVidia, something MS had no control over. Most the other problems with vista were corrected with the release of SP1. In addition to doing a clean install of vista as nizzy suggested I would recommend going with 4GB of RAM. Depending on the other components of your system 32 bit vista will only be able to "see" around 3.5GB but that extra memory will allow vista to spread out and things will run a bit smoother.

Give yourself some time to get used to vista and you may find that you really like many of its features. I dual boot both XP Pro along with Vista Ultimate x64 and I find myself using vista almost exclusively now. The only time I run XP anymore is if I need to use Photoshop (I have to call Adobe to transfer my activation), or if I encounter a program that doesn't like 64 bit OS's (mostly things from smaller developers)

 

I tried an XPS M1330 with Vista, and it is slower than a comparable 4 year old XP notebook (Inspiron 700m). Don't believe the Microsoft lurkers here, Microsoft themselves have extended XP availability to June 2009:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Artic...et-another-stay-of-execution-by-microsoft.htm
http://blogs.computerworld.com/has_microsoft_given_up_on_vista

Check out the Dell Small Business line - they offer factory installed XP upgrades. The Vostro 1510 is similar to the Inspiron 1525

 

Heh funny story about crashing and Macs ... I had to use a Mac for one of my classes. On a CLEAN INSTALL the thing would do nothing but crash. Easy to use my ... rear end ... I've never had a windows machine crash that much.

 

I resent being called a MS lurker. The simple fact is that while vista does not offer enough significant changes to warrant a switch from XP, it is not the ME 2.0 that it is being made out to be. That m1330 you "tried" how long did you use it for? When did you use it? Was it before or after SP1 was released? What were the system specs? Was it running a factory install of vista or a clean install? Because I can assure you if that thing had less than 2GB of ram and was running the dell install of Vista 1.0 its going to be running whole lot slower than it should. To often OEM's and big boxes are selling syste It has been documented in numerous real world and synthetic benchmarks that Vista SP1 performs within a few points of XP SP3 in every test. I will be more than happy to post the 3dmark06 benchmarks from my own system under both XP and Vista when i get home tonight.

MS isnt stupid, they know vista is a flop, and that its reputation is so bad that nobody is buying it. Thats why they extended OEM availability of XP until June 2009, and why they've pushed up the release of Windows 7 until late 2009 early 2010. Not because Vista is a bad OS but because no one is buying it.