has anyone removed windows vista from a laptop

Microsoft is pretty messed up, but none of their updates would erase Vista, man. Something else was afoot there.

No, no, he is saying that the update made his computer so crappy that he decided to get rid of vista and go back to XP.

Run on sentences for the win!!

You may want to consider dual booting. It's very easy with Vista installed first. That way if you have any problems with your Xp install, your not hosed with no computer at all. A lot of the new computers use SATA hdd's and if you have one then it's going to be hard to get Xp on because Xp didn't have drivers for SATA natively installed and available. If you want to dual boot you can go to http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp and get started. If you have questions you can visit a site that I write hardware reviews for and the forums are very helpful for laptops, best in the business. http://forum.notebookreview.com/ Pm if you have any questions and good luck.

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when you put in an xp installation disc the area where it says "install" is grayed out, vista won't let you do it!

i did the same thing, upgraded my dell to vista and it was taking up a gig of pf speed just sitting there. i had to backup, format my hardrive from bios, and then put in the xp install cd.

since then i've found plenty of nice vista-skins for xp. a company called stardocks makes windows blinds and desktop x, you can get transparencies and widgets using these.

depends on how much HDD you plan on using...i dont recommend dual-boot as it takes up more space...and if you aint gonna use Vista every, then i dont see the point.

Boot from an XP install CD and follow the on screen instructions to format the system partition and install XP onto it.

If the Vista installation was upgraded from XP rather then a fresh install, XP will still be on the drive if nobody has deleted it and you can use that to switch back without doing a clean format and install. Thats a bit more round the houses thougth, so its not worth posting how to do it unless somebody actually wants to.

You'll most likely have a restore partition for the preinstalled OS which you can use to send it back to out-of-the-box state. If its XP then i'd suggest using that instead of a sperate install CD since it'll be a legally acticated copy thats already paid for, instructions and any necessary boot CDs should have come with the machine.

If the restore partion is Vista, keep it anyway and be careful not to delete it during a full XP setup. you might not want to use it now, but you'll need to put it back on if you send the machine back under warrenty and its £80 you'll save later if you decide to give it another go on the machine.

As others have said, make sure that the appropriate drivers are available for XP before going back. If its the sort of spec thats having trouble running Vista for standard day to day activity, that shoulden't be much of a problem since it'll be older hardware anyway.

When I was buying a new laptop the computer salesman told me that most computers are not backwards compatible with xp because of the drivers. I bought a machine with 1gig ram and it was slow as all hell but I upgraded to 2 gig and it runs 1000 times better. Maybe just put more memory in it.

Right. I've had to do a number of driver hunts for Vista machines.

A few tips on that if you try it:

• Generic chipset driver packages from the hardware manufactuerer are your friend
• A lot of the Vista drivers will actually work in XP for things like modems and card readers, IE if you specifiy the specific driver to use and tell windows to use the damn thing regardless of the consequences.
• Use Unknown Device Identifier or a visual inspection to get your hardware model number and try the manufacturer's website.
• Try DriverAgent.com if you can at least find nic drivers. It's for pay, but it's a fantastic site and they'll let you scan your computer first to let you know what they've got available.

I woulden't worry about drivers drying up for common components for another year or so yet. XP is almost out of the consumer channel now, but allot of public sector and enterprise customers are still going to be using to be using 5.x flavors of Windows for thier systems until 6 has been fully ironed out regurdless of thier hardware.

Stuff like this isn't being helped by the fact that the entry level supply chain is clogged with XP leftovers that quite clearly arn't cut out for running Vista effectively. If you really must buy something from that end of the market, at least wait until all the antiques with old single core chips and/or 512 RAM are gone.

Im curious how the XP install went? cause Im thinking of the doing the same with my Laptop. But I just want to do a clean install.