Downgrading a laptop to WinXP

[Tirrock]

A bit of a computer newb question that I feel like I should know. Can I downgrade a laptop from vista to XP without issues? I'm thinking yes, so long as I have drivers ready. It is a dell, if that makes any sort of difference.

It's my mom's laptop, she hates vista and her laptop is too weak to run it well anyway.

[The_OG_Nelta]

Depends if the Dell laptop already came with Vista, some things might only be vista compatible, but your saying that the laptop is too weak to run vista, so i'm guessing it didn't come with Vista, so shouldn't be a problem.

[Ratatapa]

if you have drivers, sure, just make sure to have a data backup of what you need, since you will loose everything, due to formatting

[Tirrock]

It did come with vista. (With no option for XP.) It can run it, but it's pretty slow.

[Kohan]

It's pretty easy to prepare for an OS change.

Use a program like EVEREST Home Edition to find out what all of the hardware in your laptop is. Then, download drivers for the motherboard chipset, the CPU (if applicable), the graphics card, the sound, and the modem/ethernet chipset. You can download everything else later.

It's very likely that Dell will have drivers for all of these things which work in XP. If they don't, you can probably get a graphics card driver set from Guru3D, and the chipset and CPU stuff from their respective manufacturer's websites. The same should apply to the Ethernet set. When you've got them, burn all of that to a normal CD-R.

After that, wipe everything and install XP.

[octopus]

Just go to the dell website and see if they have XP drivers available.

[Sonomaa]

my tried and true method for upgrading vista to XP is to buy a second hard drive, load XP on it, that way if you need warranty work or something you can slap the vista drive back into it

[Tirrock]

I like that idea. I'll order a hard drive while I'm at it. This thing came with a tiny hard drive anyway.

Probably the most I've spent on a birthday present. D: Oh well.

[Leolai]

As said above, just if you have the drivers you should be good to go.

Alltho there is another thing to look for, newer computers often use a different mode for using the harddrive than the xp-installer can handle. (I bought my vista laptop a month ago, and it uses AHCI for handling the harddrive)
This can be avoided by either slipstream the drivers for the harddrive on a windows xp-stallation disc (google for nLite for info on how) or you can go in your BIOS and change your harddriver controler, should be in IDE-Controler or something, change that option to IDE and you should be good to go.

[Tirrock]

The laptop is a 2006 model that was blown out by dell for about 60% off. Hopefully it doesn't have a AHCI thing. Never even heard of it until now.

Thanks for the tips. Stuff from newegg is scheduled to arrive today, so I guess I'll be tinkering with it tonight.

Edit: Got it running. Didn't have time to install all the drivers before work, but it has the basics up and running. '-')b