Downgrading from Win7 to XP

Will there be any problem if I downgrade Win 7 to Win XP?

I'm plannning to get new laptop but a lot of them are Win 7.. I want XP for various reasons but main reason is for game performance, and XP is best for that ..


I heard if I downgrade there might be problem because the system is already built for Win7 and not for XP.. not sure how much truth in this, and if there's way to prevent it.

 

You cannot "downgrade" Windows; you'll have to remove Windows 7, then install XP.

If the system contains new devices (most likely), there may be no drivers available for XP.

Also if you have more than 2GB of RAM, 32-bit XP will not be able to use it.

 

I have had to do this for a few machines at work and depending on the system some would BSoD if the BIOS settings for hard drives was set to AHCI instead of IDE where Win7 can BSoD when set to IDE instead of AHCI.

As pwillener pointed out there can be issues with drivers especially if your going from 64-bit to 32-bit.

Also keep in mind that Microsoft is only going to provide updates for Windows XP for another 2 years and the highest version of directX on Windows XP is ver 9, so if any of your games requires DirectX 10+ it wont work.

 

XP 32-bit, or any 32-bit system can use 4GB of RAM minus whatever is required to map the graphics processor, usually no more than 1GB max, so usable RAM would be at least 3GB.

The math is 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 (4GB)