Uninstalling Vista, Reinstalling XP Pro?

Question

Hello, I have a new Toshiba Laptop preinstalled with Vista Home Premium (plus recovery disk). I am looking at uninstalling this and installing XP Pro, due to compatiablity issues and speed/memory etc.
If I am to install XP, would all my hardware work, such as finger print (don't really need it), 5 in 1 card reader, bluetooth, wifi, 10/100/1000 LAN etc. Would XP find these automatically? or do I need to undertake the painful task of downloading each individual driver/software for XP?

Answer 1

I think that would depend mostly on how recent the install cd is of XP Pro. If it is most recent (service pack 2b) then it should find almost everything. MY brother has a Toshiba with most of those features and had no issues doing what you are about to do. He also had speed / memory issues and wanted to go back to XP...

Good luck.....

Answer 2

Installing XP on a machine that was shipped with Vista is a backwards move according to Microsoft's way of thinking so you will need to Format your hard drive in order to install XP. That as we know will wipe out all data. XP will pick up some of the drivers, but there will be some pieces of hardware for which you will have to locate and download drivers.

Vista handles system resources much better then XP and so I don't think that you'll notice any improvement in system response. If you are having a compatibility problem with a piece of software, try running it in "compatibility" mode.

I did need to add memory to my "Vista" laptop when I first got the thing, but then we are all aware the computer manufactures send these machines out with "just" enough ram so that they barley run. Once I added system memory, everything started working very well.

I would think things over before I replaced Vista. It is the OS of the future, so we had better get used to it. By the way, have you turned off the Areo interface. That in it's self will release quite a bit of system memory. It's also hard on battery life.