Can most laptops on Vista be downgraded to XP ?

Can you buy something that can accomplish this on most laptops with Vista ?

 

Yes, you can.

 

The only problem would be finding drivers if it's not supported by the manufacturer. However you should be able to find them if you search hard enough.

 

Before you purchase one, make sure that you can find the drivers. The best source I have found is searching the posts here for the model you are interested incase someone has already done the legwork. I am in the same frame of mind, I only get laptops that will run XP.

 

Yes, however you cannot go to the maker of your laptop unless they support a downgrade.

So you need to go to....say if you have an intel chipset, to intel.com, if you have a graphics driver, go to amd.com or nvidia ect ect.....

Sometimes you may get the wrong driver, sometimes you get the right one,.....once you find the ones that work, wipe/reload again.....

 

As others said, you may have a problem finding the drivers. And some of the Fn Keys, Multimedia Keys, Power Management Software may not work. Sony posted XP drivers for my FW but I still can't make all the Fn and Special Buttons to work. Power Management doesn't work very well and some other utilities don't work either.

 

How do you downgrade exactly ?

 

It's basically installing Windows XP from scratch. It's called a downgrade as XP is previous to Vista.

Driver compatability is the only problem that happens after that.

 

Then I need to buy XP seperately , no way to do this 4 free ?

 

No, there isn't.

 

If you get Vista Business, it comes with XP Pro downgrade rights. So then you can downgrade for free, but only if you have access to an XP Pro installation disc AND you can find drivers and get XP to work on the hardware.

 

^^ Yep, but think carefully about doing this. Once changed, it cannot be re-upgraded to Vista for free

cheers ...

 

Buying a non-netbook laptop today and trying to stick with XP is a losing battle. Vista is "the thing" and the industry expects users to use it, kicking and screaming if needed.

If you absolutely WILL NOT use Vista for whatever reason, you may as well stick to whatever old laptop you have that has XP on it currently. You do not seem like the type to be able to keep up with self-supporting your drivers and OS needs.

 

Finding drivers is likely the least of your issues.
Drivers for XP exist on manufacturers websites for the most part.
If you want to downgrade from Vista, then first make sure to go into Device Manager while Vista is installed.
This will provide you with names/numbers of installed devices in your laptop and will make it much easier to download correct XP drivers instead of guessing which ones you need.

First rule of downgrading from pre-installed Vista to XP:
go into Device Manager and look up the devices installed so you can find their XP drivers online.

 

Not true... you can go back to Vista if you want... at least according to this document from Microsoft: http://download.microsoft.com/downl...cbd-699b0c164182/royaltyoemreferencesheet.pdf

I agree that just using Vista will make your life much easier, unless you have some programs that absolutely will not work with it for whatever reason. Besides, IMO, for most uses, Vista is the best version of Windows yet released, despite the bad reputation.

 

Keyword - migrating. I'll look into this, thanks for the correction.

cheers ...

 

Could you elaborate why you should stick to an old laptop? I have not yet seen one system that a bit of googling could not be made to work with XP, irrespective of OEM.

And what magical function does Vista have that XP doesn't? I'll give you hotswapping and a 'cool' interface. Anything else? Most people don't count little desktop gimmicks that you can easily find free for XP.

XP's advantages over Vista have been listed to death, albeit with some hyperbole and FUD .

 

Maybe... but some are far from easy to get working with XP, requiring downgrading of BIOS, messing with SATA drivers, scouring the net for other drivers etc.

A lot of business models (Lenovo Thinkpad, Dell Latitude, etc.) are offered with XP, so if one of those works for you it could make things easier.

Uh oh... please don't turn this into another XP vs. Vista thread. I think I'm partly to blame for getting this thread into that debate. But still... we have more than enough XP vs. Vista threads already. Personally, I just meant to suggest considering whether Vista might meet your needs just as well as XP. If it doesn't, then by all means go ahead and downgrade.

 

Many people do not understand the idea of googling for drivers. As well, there are issues like nVidia/ATI with their drivers where they, for whatever reason, do not properly support the notebook market. Until recently neither had any driver available at all, and now ATI sort of does (for some platforms) and nVidia is at least trying, though their last beta "for notebooks" driver didn't work on my Sager, which didn't matter since it was basically a re-packaged old driver anyway.

Vista is 100% supported now and XP is less supported. Regardless of what the two OS's are, and which is "better" in someone's opinion is useless when one of the OS's has the backing of the OEMs and one doesn't.

If you want to bang around on an 8-year old OS, that's your right. I don't think anyone wants to take that from you. Of course in 2001 when XP was released, I would have told the guy who refused to give up his 8-year old Win 3.1 box the same thing. Use what works for you. (all that guy probably did was whine about this new-fangled 'USB' fad that wasn't gonna go anywhere since who wants to use that..)

 

Well, Microsoft rather wants to take away the ability to use XP on new laptops. Otherwise, it's just a matter of OEM's not wanting to pay to support it if they can get away with it.

But it's a bit unfair comparing XP in 2009 with 3.11 in 2001. 3.11 was the 5th most recent version then, not 2nd most recent. Although I have to say I was impressed that 3.11 ran on my vintage 2007 laptop very well. Probably a whole lot faster than it ever ran on any computer of its day!

But most laptops can be made to work with XP, if with some effort.

 

I think you'll find XP has extended support until 2014. The difference between 'extended' and 'mainstream' being 'warranty and design changes'. How .crucial. OEM support - again, never seen any card, chipset, peripheral etc from any OEM that did not have a working XP equivalent, regardless of any scripted mumblings to the contrary by some Indian call-centre staff.

I don't get much reassurance any more from a 'Vista-ready' sticker. Dell decided to put those labels on their products, while the company itself quietly stuck with XP for its own use. The day I see functional differences because something (driver/app) is 100% Vista, I can weigh the benefit of those differences against the high cost (not $) of Vista.

The truth is, you can't give a single compelling reason for anyone to 'upgrade', so you choose instead to paint all XP'ers as old timers clinging to the past out of fear and nostalgia. With a little more humility, you might find some of us actually have (gasp!) valid performance reasons for preferring XP. It is even possible that XP is superior, if you like fast, snappy systems and can manage your security sensibly. Surely you don't actually think that anyone on this forum would run from a childish toy like Vista because they couldn't cope with it or the dramatic changes it brings, do you??