[temeteus82]

Hi there! I’ve seen lately a lot of threads about downgrading laptop with Vista to XP. It seems that people have a lot’s of problems downgrading so I decided to write some simple steps that you need to do before you start the downgrade.

Step one.

Open the Device manager in Vista, you can find it in Control Panel \ System and Maintenance \ System on the side tab there is the link to the Device Manager. Write down what Display adapter, LAN controller/WLAN controller and Audio controller you have, you need to know those when looking the drivers for Windows XP. You can also look what chipset drivers you need. You can see them in system devices. Some manufacturers some technical specifications on their sites So they will be helpful also when you are looking the correct drivers.

Step two.

Look all the drivers that you would need for windows XP in internet. Most of them can be found on the support pages of the chip makers that have provided their chips to your laptop. Drivers that you need are mainly Display adapter-, LAN controller/WLAN controller- and Audio controller drivers. The chipset drivers can be installed after XP has been installed. Save the drivers to removable media, USB memory stick or CD-R disc, so they are safe when you install the Windows XP. And remember to disconnect the media before starting the installation of Windows XP.

Step three.

Install the Windows XP from it's CD. Remember to pres enter when prompted " Press any key to boot from CD. ". When selecting the location of the installation remember to remove the vista partition and create new partition for Windows XP.

Step four.

When Windows XP is installed install the network cards/WLAN cards drivers if needed. Then run Windows Update to get the updates. I highly recommend that you update to SP3 before installing any audio/video drivers. After Windows XP is fully updated install the audio and video drivers you obtained earlier. Reboot after both installations are done, the setups may prompt you to reboot but select reboot later.

And finally some things what you should know.

1. When the laptop manufacturer has shipped the laptop with Vista pre-installed it means that they are only supporting that operating system and therefore some or all features of the laptop may not work on other operating systems.

2. nVidia or AMD/ATi don’t offer drivers for their mobile products. So you would need drivers with modified inf files. For AMD/ATi mobility cards you can use our MonilityModder.NET to modify the normal desktop version of AMD/ATi's Catalyst drivers. For nVidia you can look the site called laptopvideo2go.com. Do note that the inf modified nVidia drivers might cause some problems with hotkey functions.