Vista to XP

I finally took the plunge and "down"graded from Vista to XP. All I can say is I wish I'd done it a lot sooner instead of wasting a year trying to "adjust" to a crap operating system! For those of you who actually like Vista (and I presume you have at least 3 gigs of RAM) I should explain that my system had slowed to a crawl despite repeated system restores, recoveries and installation of SP1.

Not only that but it had developed at least a half dozen serious bugs and wouldn't run several of my favorite programs correctly.

Anyway, back to the story: The downgrade was not nearly as difficult as they make it sound, although the difficulty level may depend on your machine specifics. Just make sure you get copies of your drivers (the XP versions!). In my case, Packard Bell had them all for download on their support page.

Another thing I recommend is to forget about "slipstreaming" drivers or service packs using nLite as recommended by a lot of sites. It just complicates things and it can destroy your product key. Imagine going through all that work and then having your product key rejected!

You can install drivers and service packs once you have XP up and running.

So here's a quick rundown:

1. Download XP drivers for your machine and make copies on CD or other storage device.
2. Do a full format using the free utility from dban.org
3. Install XP
4. Install drivers and service pack.
5. If you've got an older copy of XP with IE6 upgrade to IE7 and/or Firefox. The newer browsers offer far superior display quality and features.

That's it. Even if you've got 20 gigs of RAM running Vista just imagine what it will do with XP!