Reformating Visa and intalling XP

[Komm Suesser Tod]

I have a Sony Vaio laptop that my wife mostly uses, and it's been running kind of slow and is almost completely full, hard drive wise, so we've been planning to reformat. She has a copy of XP, and I was wondering if I could just reformat and boot off of the XP disc, or if there was something else I would have to do.

Thanks in advance.

[Kriz]

Laptops are horrible if you don't have the original OS CD, because of drivers. You can probably get XP on there, but you'll have to hit up the Sony site for drivers for almost everything. Even then, you may miss some (oh noez, some worthless media key might not work).

I doubt you can just take the drivers from Vista and move them to XP (others can correct me here), but yeah you can do XP on it, but it's gonna be tough probably.

But worth it.

[Skjie]

Terrible idea. Getting new XP drivers for a Vista Sony Laptop is difficult and even if they provide them, you won't have all features.

[Cheerios]

If you reformat and install from the Windows XP disc, you will get default XP drivers in your System32 folder. They should be compatible unless you built the PC yourself.

Make sure you have chipset drivers/network drivers ready on a separate medium or you're probably gonna be screwed if it doesn't work the way you intend it to.

[Komm Suesser Tod]

Ok, so I should keep it Vista. Anybody know where I could find my vista key for my laptop, and a disc to install it off of? Both of my computers that have it came with it pre-installed.

[Blubbartron]

You can torrent a copy of vista to burn to DVD (with or without cracking). If you don't care to steal the copy, you can find your key with a program called PC Wizard 2008 (no idea if it's 2009 yet or not, been a while since I've used it). It finds all sorts of neat stuff hidden in your computer. Like every username and password you've ever used and with what website you used it on. Lots of little goodies like that hidden in the registry.

[bungiefan]

My experience with machines that ship with Vista is that you may not be able to find XP drivers for their hardware. One of my roommates has a 2 year old HP Pavillion that came with Vista, and HP has no motherboard chipset driver for XP, so if he installs XP, it crashes upon boot, and there is no way to stop that. The only companies I have seen releasing XP drivers for all their hardware is Dell and Apple. Otherwise, prebuilt machines may not have drivers for the sound card, the graphics card, or the motherboard chipset, which can make your machine not work, or be stuck with no sound or 800x600 video resolution.

As for the registration code, prebuilt machines have it on a sticker stuck to them when shipped from the factory. It's the seal of authenticity Microsoft puts out, and it's greenish usually. Otherwise, you can usually find your code in your registry (Microsoft has a guide to it in their help pages), and at least for up to XP, you could use a freeware program called Magical Jellybean Windows Key Finder to tell you your registration codes for Office and the operating system on the machine you ran it on. The programmer may have updated it for Vista.

Reformatting is a little extreme if the hard drive is just full. Start burning stuff off to DVD for backup, or get an external hard drive. You want a copy of your documents anyway, in case your hard drive crashes or gets corrupted.

[Skjie]

Ok, so I should keep it Vista. Anybody know where I could find my vista key for my laptop, and a disc to install it off of? Both of my computers that have it came with it pre-installed.

The key should be on the underside of the unit. If not, Jellybean keyfinder is the best software.

Also, reiterating: Sony support for drivers is fucking terrible.