Laptop dilemma :'(

Ok so I got a second hand ASUS x52s today, it came with no driver disks or copy of windows vista. Just the laptop.

It has windows vista ultimate which I can't stand with media center, and either way my favorite thing to do to get rid of spyware/adware is to install a fresh copy of windows every now and then.

I have a windows xp pro (service pack 1!) disk which I use, but I'm scared to install it on my laptop as I heard it could render some features unusable. And the ASUS support website has no drivers or anything for this laptop!

So, what should I do to install a copy of windows xp and still be able to use all of the laptops features?

 

You can disable all the Media Center services.

For XP drivers, you should be able to find most of them on the net. The only things you may not find are the hotkey (Fn) application and maybe the ASUS power management software.

Personally, I'd try to tweak and clean up Vista Ultimate first. I've dual-boot Vista/XP on my laptop, and Vista isn't any slower than XP.

 

Ok well all basically the only problem I have is, I want a fresh computer. I want to be able to keep vista ultimate with all the perks, drivers and media center but for it to be like new.

How can I do this?

I heard about creating a recovery disk, but I assume it's gona copy all previous users settings on top of everything.

 

Recovery discs made with your current installation will not be a clean install, basically it's an image of your current installation. For clean installation, you need to find yourself a Vista disc and use your own product key. You should backup your key with Orev's ABR tool, and when you do a fresh install, you can use the same tool to restore the activation, this way you won't have to perform a normal activation.

 

See if there might be a recovery partition on the drive... that should have a few programs Asus preinstalled, but it shouldn't have any user's stuff on it.

Another option is to borrow a Vista disc and use your own key with it, as stewie said.

 

If the machine does still have a recovery partition on it, you may be able to boot into recovery mode and revert it to it's original out-of-box state. This may not be a clean install like you want (I don't know what kind of bloatware Asus puts on their machines), but it would probably be cleaner than what you have now.

If you can't get into system recovery during boot-up, there may be an app installed that let's you create a set of system recovery discs.