Going Back to XP

Just couldn't stand VISTA no more and had to do something about it. I had VISTA x64 bit and most of my Thumb Drives, USB Drives didn't work. Kodak Printer worked when it wanted to, system lock ups, the usual blah, blah, etc.....If you have Vista 32 or 64, you know what I mean. I am also looking into a plotter and don't think you can get one that supports VISTA 64. Either way it just had to go. PERIOD!
I bought a GATEWAY DX 4710-09 back after the Icestorm here and bought one with 6 Gbs of RAM because I knew that VISTA alone needed 1gb. FYI, that is one of the big diffrences between 32bit and 64bit. Vista 32 and XP 32 bits will only support 3gbs of RAM.....so changing back, I lost 3gbs of RAM on my PC BUT it's running better and faster than Vista did with 6.
There are other ways like Dual Booting both VISTA and XP, Virtual Machine (running Vista and having XP) as a Virtual Machine but I just didn't want VISTA PERIOD. So, this is how I did it.
If you are going to do this get all the info about your PC that you can. I would also suggest installing FIREFOX with the Xmarks add-on (this allows you to put your Bookmarks on a Server and access them from another PC with Xmarks installed). Does it have an IDE or ATA Hard Drive? (Look at the cables going to the HD itself, IDE are the Ribbon Style cables and ATA are half their size). Search the NET, I'm sure someone has done it with your PC already. Someone had done it for my type system already and once I followed his procedures everything went fine (I'll explain that shortly because I guess XP didn't have S ATA drivers.)
Alright, so I got me a OEM Copy of XP Professional for $25 from ebid. I then bought another SATA Hard Drive. I did this so if I messed anything up, I still had the VISTA Drive.
I installed the XP CD, powered off, disconnected the VISTA Drive, installed the New SATA drive, and will the machine was booting up Hit F10 and told it to boot from the CD.....THEN I got stuck at the Black screen
Tried that a few times then got on another PC and found his guy who had the SATA drive drivers for my machine and then explained how to use Nlite. Very cool program that allows you to add drivers/ take away all that Excess crap and burn another XP CD. Followed this guys steps Pranay Sharma - Windows Xp drivers for Gateway DX4710-05and BINGO.
Problem will be finding the Drivers for everything, I have had a program called Uniblue Driver Scanner. So all I needed was to manually load my Ethernet drivers and got internet. Once internet was up I just used that program to update all my drivers for me. Then just do a Windows Update.
Once that was completed, powered down and connected the VISTA drive back. Powered up and hit f10 again, (if not it'll boot VISTA) and told it to boot XP. Once XP was up, I Formatted the VISTA drive, now I have 650gbs of storage and my Operating system on a 500gb HD, plenty of space. ..............Kwit

[cdv]

Sounds like a darn nightmare. I've got two computers right now both still XP, when I bought the latest (laptop) I made sure it still had XP and I'm glad. Now with the new Microsoft system coming out, I'm not sure what to do other than try to keep these two running as long as possible. Heck, just about 8 months ago I finally got rid of the older computer that had windows 95? on it..... can't even remember what the operating system was called the darn thing was so old. Like me LOL

Cliff

[redneck]

don't have VISTA [good thing ] is vista the newer thing or did microsoft come out with a new one ?

[Jammer]

Hmmmm I got my new laptop, Hp dv7 in march and it has vista 64 and I love it. All my programs work with it. I haven't had any crash problems or anything. I do use Tweak VI to adjust my settings. I hear all these horror stories about vista but I haven't had any. guess I'm lucky.
I will try Windows 7 after the 1st service pack comes out for it.