So long, Vista

[Amasov]

Having reached my limit with Windows Vista, I decided that it's time to go back to Windows XP Media Center. The amount of problems that Vista has caused is just unbelievable, but I'm not starting a thread to bitch about this OS. I do, however, have a question pertaining to "downgrading" to XP.

I'm good with a computer, but when it comes to installing an OS, I get nervous. I've got a few concerns and I was hoping some of you guys could help me out. I'll just post each question I have point by point.

You should know that I'm installing XP just simply by partitioning the drive - erasing everything on there and loading the entire OS.

Here is my question/concern:

- Will I need to back up my drivers, or will the installation of XP be able to compensate?

I ran into a problem when installing Vista and did a roll back to XP. When I had XP back up, I had no sound, internet connection, and the screen resolution was way off and could not be adjusted.

That's really all I'm worried about. I have a program that will be able to back up my drivers and then import them once the new OS is installed and that's IF my drivers are lost.

I guess the best way to put it is, what is it I can do to make this go smoothly? I'm just nervous about making a fatal error.

Thanks for your help, gang.

Much appreciated.

 

[BolianAuthor]

All I can offer is that if you are going from Vista to XP, you're UPGRADING, not downgrading.

 

[Charlie Kelly]

Vista drivers will not work on XP unless they where XP drivers to begin with. I'd try and find the drivers for all your hardware before reinstalling XP by going to the manufacturer's website. It would be better if you still had the driver disk that came with the computer though.

Most of your hardware will already have some driver for it that's included with XP. But usually the video driver and sound driver are not and sometimes also the network driver (which may be what caused your problems the first time). If these devices are intergrated into the motherboard you could get them all in one swoop from the manufacturer of your motherboard. If the Internet Connection didn't work last time (and I'm assuming you connect to the Internet through your ethernet port) you will definetly need to get the network driver before installing XP so you can then connect to the Internet afterwards and look for the remaining drivers.

Just curious though, what where your main problems with Vista?

Charlie

 

[trekkerguy]

Wow, sorry to hear that, Vista's been awesome. I'd never go back.

 

[Deks]

Well, I have a new generation laptop so I have XP SP3 (32bit) and Vista Home Premium SP1 (64bit).

I'm primarily utilizing Vista x64 (at least until Windows 7 x64 comes out) for 3dsMax x64 which will behave even better than under a 32bit environment and use my new hardware to the maximum.
But I must admit I was primarily disappointed with such a non-existant software support for 64bit OS (drivers were fine ... it's the third party software I usually use under a 32bit OS that was the issue).

Anyway ... I have encountered some issues with Vista myself in terms of older software support (dos based that was working fine in XP).
But overall, for general aspects, XP is better as it uses much less resources ... at the same time though, it's potentially problematic with high ram usage as management of RAM is better in Vista.

In any case ... when going back to XP, do what I did:
Open up your Vista OS again and go into Control panel. Next open up device manager and find out the names/number/designations of all of the relevant hardware drivers (graphics card, wireless [if you use it], LAN [ethernet] card, sound card, then chipset and finally sata drivers), and download them all on the manufacturer's websites (they are bound to have virtually all drivers for various OS'es ... most definitely XP, so you will be fine).

You can easily find out the chipset manufacturer using a free simple tool called 'cpu-z'
Search it up on google, download and run (doesn't require installation).
Once you learn on the chipset name, you will also know which SATA drivers to install (as XP has a tendency of producing a BSOD if you don't pre-install sata drivers).
That's based on the premise that you do use a SATA hard drive.
But what you can easily do is this:
Go into BIOS, switch from AHCI to IDE. Then install XP, after that, install the chipset driver and SATA drivers. Restart, open up BIOS and return the options from IDE to AHCI.

That's the only larger problem I can imagine you going through ... the drivers are easy to come by downloading them from manuf. websites (besides, they will have the latest drivers which might prove to be even better than the old ones).