Downgrading to XP on a Gateway M-6862

Hey all, so recently I was asking for a laptop with a decent video card built in and went ahead w/ the Gateway M-6862. Well from the getgo I knew I wanted to load XP w/ SP2 on it and thought it would be a cinch: just boot into BIOS w/ the CD in. Well as I found out what others already knew, this wasn't the case because, apparently, the Windows CD cannot find a hard drive to even format.

So from my searching I found these two links:
1) EdmontonGeek.com; and,
2) a popular post on these forums by Bronislaw ( here).

Basically I'm wanting to know if it's really worth all of the hassle to downgrade to XP. From what I'm reading, it's a hit or miss with finding drivers to work on laptops with XP. And from looking at Gateway's own support, I'm only seeing Vista-related links.

My question is: Has anyone with a Gateway M-6000 series successfully downgraded from Vista (Home Premium in my case) to XP with success? If so, how difficult was it? I also wouldn't mind people weighing their opinion otherwise on why to keep Vista vs. downgrading.

 

hey i have the gateway 6874h laptop and i did manage to downgrade to xp sp3 and it was pretty good, but there were a few drivers missing like sound and this thing called mass storage controller (don't kno what it is) but like if i got sound to work i wouldn't care, but sadly this was not the case, so what i would sugguest is that you shrink the volume in vista and make a new partition in vista and install xp to see how it is (that's what i did)

but beware once you instal xp u need a vista cd to restore vista boot loader. In case xp doesn't work out for you.
and if you wanna go back to vista its as easy as install boot loader, load vista, go into manage hd and delete the xp partition and thats it

 

Hm, sounds like a lot of work for something that may not even work. Unsupported sound drivers? ::gasp!!::

Any other feedback?

 

Actually, when downgrading a Gateway to XP, it's pretty easy to find the drivers... Just go to the Gateway website, go to your laptop, click the driver you need... For Example, you need the Sound Driver for XP, but the one for your Gateway is only Vista... Click the driver and click the laptops that use the same driver. Since those laptops use the same part that your laptop uses, you can check if they have the XP driver... that's what I did for my MT-6459. But since your laptop model is kinda new, I don't think there will be any XP drivers for it.