Missing XP home disks

My daughter gave me her Pavillion dv1000 because it was so incredibly slow she could not use it. Not being a PC person (I am a mac user) I could not help much. Over time I have played with her HP and discovered that she is running Vista Business on a machine with only 512 MB of memory. I would like to reformat the disk and install XP Home edition. She could not find the disks so I have nothing to start with. However, there is a product key on the bottom of the machine. Could this be used somehow to download a fresh copy of Home Edition?

 

1. how old is the computer?
2. what processor does it have?
3. Did it originally ship with XP?, if yes why'd she put vista on it?

 

You MAY be able to install Windows XP Home provided you use an XP Home OEM CD. I say may because some big box pc makers have at one time or another used various methods to annoy the crap out of their users (special OEM specific keys, cd-keys tied to proprietary OEM disks, bios dependent Windows installs).

Is the sticker on the bottom form XP? Did you try tapping f11 key and see if you get a factory reinstall option?

 

Thanks for the reply. The F11 key does not seem to do anything. And, yes, it is an XP sticker on the bottom.

All I want to use this computer for is listening to online music or seeing movies. So much always seems to be going on in the background that something as simple as opening the control panel and fully load the icons takes almost 30 seconds. Opening Firefox can take up to a minute.

 

So, you have nothing to lose. If you can obtain a generic xphome OEM (not retail, not upgrade) disk, there is a good chance (not 100 percent), that you can install it using the key on the bottom of your laptop.

 

Also in some HP/Compaq's its F10 that is the recovery console. It was in my previous HP laptop and Compaq Desktop.

 

and sometimes f12

I am curious how vista got on this laptop---my guess is that whoever wiped it, probably killed the restoration partition, too...but you never know

 

Maybe it was one of those ones that came "Vista capable" and received a free upgrade? thats how my old HP laptop wound up with vista, only having 512MB of ram it was a bit of a joke.