What is the best way to downgrade VISTA to XP?

Question

I just bought a gateway laptop with 1 GB DDR2 RAM...

Now the VISTA is giving me the pain in the ***...and I want to downgrade it to XP.

Any good suggestion?

Answer 1

Basically, while you can "upgrade" to Vista from XP (that is, overlay a new OS in place of the old one while retaining your programs and settings), you can not "downgrade" from Vista to XP. So, you can't really "go back".

What you will have to do is remove Vista and replace it entirely with XP. You will not be able to save your programs. You will be able to save your data. You might be able to save your settings (i.e., configuration settings, favorites, email accounts, etc.)

How you save what you have now depends on how your drive is partitioned. If you have only one partition, you will need to copy your files to another drive, internal or external. Your choice of hard drive or optical.

To save your settings, run Windows Easy Transfer inside Vista. The link below is to a blog written by the MS team about Windows Easy Transfer:

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/02/15/using-windows-easy-transfer.aspx

Write the results to a file -- on another drive or on a writeable CD. After you reinstall XP, use the same program in XP to load that file. Here's where it gets iffy. While the XP-to-Vista transfer will work, we don't know if the Vista-to-XP transfer will work.

Answer 2

I see 2 options - either buy a copy of XP, or buy more ram so that vista can function better.