The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Switching from Vista to XP

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by chadannmarie, Aug 15, 2008.

  1. chadannmarie

    chadannmarie Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    3
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Hi everybody,

    I'm trying to change a friend's Dell Inspiron 1501 from a Vista OS to XP Home Edition. The computer frequently crashes and has to be restarted. It's been doing this since a little after she bought it, pre-installed with Vista, 10 months ago. We are fairly sure it's because of Vista. She uses it fairly basically, for record keeping for her business, email, and internet.

    I've read some articles online but I'm still unsure of exactly how to do it all. Have any of you done this? Would you please give me advice?

    We've copied all of her files from the desktop and My Documents onto a flash drive. We dragged her email into folders on the flash drive as well. Will we be able to drag the Emails back into XP's Outlook? What do we do about the various programs? They mostly came pre-installed on the computer, except a couple games that were bought off the internet (like Wheel of Fortune.) So we don't have disks to re-install software. Do we need to back all of the programs up? Is there a way to put them onto the flash drive and intall them on XP?

    I'm worried about problems coming up and making this take several days. (She uses the computer for her business, so that would be a big pain.) I would love any tips and advice. Would you please tell me how best to do this?

    Thanks!

    Chad
     
    chadannmarie, Aug 15, 2008
    #1
  2. SmoothTofu

    SmoothTofu Inspiron 1420 Owner

    Reputations:
    64
    Messages:
    1,481
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    55
    SmoothTofu, Aug 15, 2008
    #2
  3. millermagic

    millermagic Rockin the pinktop

    Reputations:
    330
    Messages:
    1,742
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    55
    Yup. Either get rid of the "crapware" or give it a clean install. You won't be disappointed.

    What applications are you using? Are they compatible with Vista
     
    millermagic, Aug 15, 2008
    #3
  4. chadannmarie

    chadannmarie Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    3
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Wow! Thanks a lot!

    That's an awesome post you directed me to. So far I've plugged in a flash drive to give it an extra 4gb of RAM using the ReadyBoost utility (amazing!), and I've stopped a lot of the useless programs from starting automatically. The computer now starts up quicker and responds much faster. It has not crashed since I've made those changes. I'll probably keep on through the list of things to do that are in that post, but those alone have made a major difference and I think they fixed the crashing problem. (I think the computer was overloading the RAM, causing it to shut down. But now that it has 6 rather than 2 gb of RAM...)

    Thanks a bunch :)

    Chad
     
    chadannmarie, Aug 16, 2008
    #4
  5. chadannmarie

    chadannmarie Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    3
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    I just want to let you know the computer hasn't crashed since I made these chnages and it's much faster :eek: Big thanks!!!
     
    chadannmarie, Sep 9, 2008
    #5