Downgrade from Vista to XP

I am ready to upgrade my desktop computer. All of the computers I have looked at have Vista Home Premium. I have not heard anything good about Vista and, in fact, the new computer recently bought for me by my employer was purchased from Dell simply because that was the only place they could get one with XP on it. Within the last year, I upgraded my old computer from ME to XP home. No problems. I have copies of 98, ME and XP home available and would like to know if, and how, I could "downgrade" a new computer to XP home.

I was told by one of the guys at work that I could format the hard drive, insert a 98 disc in the computer and then put the XP home disc in.
(He said that the XP upgrade disc would not work with Vista and that putting the 98 disc in would "fool" the computer into accepting the XP upgrade.)

Is there anything to his theory? Can anyone tell me how to do this or even whether it is possible?

I was told by Best Buy that I could order a computer with XP on it but I don't expect that it would be as cheap as some of the package deals I see in stock.

I will appreciate any help or advice.

 

You're replacing the OS, not upgrading or down grading it. All you do is install XP in its place (reformatting the hard drive)

What are your reasons for wanting to keep xp? Changing the OS may not be necessary.

 

You can format the HDD then run the XP upgrade CD/install

During the upgrade install it will look for an qualifying OS such as 98 at some point during the install you will be prompted to insert a cd containing a qualifying OS, nothing will be installed from your 98 cd, the upgrade install only needs to see that you have a qualifying OS on CD





At Gimp, XP is faster:neener

 

I did a "downgrade" from Vista to XP, not exactly by choice. A friend who works in IT offered to help to set me up with partitions to dual-boot Vista and XP, and it didn't work out well -- the Vista OS wouldn't let us load the XP OS correctly, and we ended up wiping the drive and just installing XP.

That ended up with me having to hunt down and install drivers and codecs that work under XP, and since the hardware was designed for VISTA, I had some small glitches before everything got smoothed out.
(I'll consider Vista again when it is stable with service packs and updates.)

So, if you decide to wipe out Vista and go with XP on a Vista-designed machine, you will probably have to install XP audio and video drivers and codecs, and some of them will probably take some serious googling.

good luck

 

If there are drivers that even exist for XP, many Vista systems have no XP drivers. You were fortunate.

 

I guess my reasons are concerns about software compatibility. I keep hearing horror stories about that. My main concerns are MS Office 2003, The savings bond software from the Gov., Roxio CD Creator 6, My Camera software Camedia 4.2 (from Olympus).

Other than software compatibility, are you hearing about any other problems with it?