windows vista

ronben

Cricri wrote: »

Anyway, if I was to downgrade a PC, I'd just reinstall XP from scratch. Get a XP CD, put it in the drive, reboot, and the PC should booot from the XP installation menu.

And not forgetting the audio/video/ drivers the monitor driver, keyboard mouse and any other driver that is specifed for the machine, its not impossible but quite difficult if you have no experience of this kind of manual install, and if all goes wrong and a last resort is needed its a lot easier to run a factory restore from a partition or OS DVD's

But its horses for courses I suppose.

Cricri

The only driver I would be concerned about would be the network card driver: if your network card works, you'll always be able to get other drivers from internet. But if your network card doesn't work, then duh
To be honest, I can't imagine why XP wouldn't have a generic driver for your keyboard, mouse and graphic card. If it was an obscure audio chipset or onboard modem, maybe, but I've never had a problem having XP installing drives, mouse, keyboard and graphics.

DatabaseError

not forgetting that the new vista machine will have a SATA drive, which the XP disk possibly won't understand, requiring a driver to get started (i use 'interesting' disks so don't have that problem )

TonyLisaP

PROLIANT wrote: »

I would just dual boot the system, format the HDD and install Windows XP, then install Windows Vista along side it. Then you got best of both worlds.

If he has factory restore disks then it would completely wipe off the XP installation as it wipes the HDD first.

TonyLisaP

tonyhague wrote: »

not forgetting that the new vista machine will have a SATA drive, which the XP disk possibly won't understand, requiring a driver to get started (i use 'interesting' disks so don't have that problem )

There isn't any issues with SATA drives with XP. I have even installed Win2k on SATA with no additional drivers.

Cricri

Again, for the mouse and keyboard, you'll always be able to download those. I have a Logitech mouse+keyboard with loads of extra keys, I just installed SetPoint and I was sorted.
The SATA can be a bit more tricky, but all you have to do is press F6 when XP boots and make it load the driver that is provided with the motherboard. Albeit if you don't have a floppy drive, the F6 trick might lead you nowhere

PROLIANT

TonyLisaP wrote: »

If he has factory restore disks then it would completely wipe off the XP installation as it wipes the HDD first.

True, or could use Virtual PC or like your VMWare setup, personally I would just stick wit one O/S, I did design a cluster system once comprising of 4 Pentium 4 Hyperthread core's, each 1GB of RAM and Gigabit ethernet for the cluster link and Knoppix to drive it, went like sh*t off a shovel :eek:

TonyLisaP

PROLIANT wrote: »

True, or could use Virtual PC or like your VMWare setup, personally I would just stick wit one O/S, I did design a cluster system once comprising of 4 Pentium 4 Hyperthread core's, each 1GB of RAM and Gigabit ethernet for the cluster link and Knoppix to drive it, went like sh*t off a shovel :eek:

Wasn't running Vista then! :rotfl:

russ_gillespie

Cricri wrote: »

Why do you post if you're not going to post a relevant answer?
If I ask someone "Where can I get red paint", it's not to be asked in return "why don't you get green paint instead?".

You may not have noticed but this is a forum, somewhere you come to discuss things and exchange views. Let's do that, shall we?