Should I just through with formatting my hard drive and rebooting with my xp disk or is there a better way. And If I do this will I lose my drivers on my laptop? Thanks..

 

There's a ton of links on Google ... the driver issue will depend on what model laptop it is. Best advice is to search out drivers and burn them to a CD prior to downgrading.

 

i know there are.. for some reason its like im reading chinese though...

 

If it looks like Chinese to you, perhaps downgrading it yourself isn't the best idea? It's kind of important that you're able to understand what you're doing.

 

By the way, Vista has a help topic on the subject.

 

QFT right there.

I've had two experienced computer technicians try and help me with downgrading my computers to XP, with little luck. Googling and getting results that 'look like chinese' to you? Don't even THINK about doing it yourself.

 

Only real way to downgrade is a fresh install of XP, which is pretty straight forward. Stick your XP disc in, format your paritions, load the OS. Make sure to download the drivers specific to your machine and burn them to a disc before hand. As well as backing up any important files.

 

If you format your hard drive, and you have an XP disc sitting there....it might not load past the EULA on XP because you need an OLDER copy of windows to continue the install (like windows ME or 98 disc) when you try to load XP on a HD, so beware if you format the hard drive with vista, because you need to load the 98 or ME disc when installing XP.

So if you dont have an older copy of windows you may be stuck.

ALternative =

Dual Boot. You can still have Vista installed but partition your HD to run in a dual boot configuration so you can choose what Operating System to run.

Maybe look at installing Linux? or XP....on a dual boot.

 

unless you built the computer yourself and have every driver already available for the guts inside, I really don't recommend downgrading to XP. You really won't be guaranteed for everything to work properly... but on the other hand, if it is absolutly brand new, and you have all the recovery/boot disks to put it right back the way you started off, I guess it couldn't hurt to try.

Do you have a necessary reason to downgrade? like something you really need, that doesn't work in Vista? because if it's just that you don't like the new features, you can change almost all of them back to the way they were on XP.