New Dell 531s, install xp?

[sodamninsane]

Got a new dell 531s AMD Based desktop for my g/f's parents today in the mail. Fired it up and vista is a royal pain in the butt.. It hogs so many resources and is just plain unfriendly to people who aren't computer savvy that I would really like to drop it off to them with XP installed instead.

Formatted the drive, erased all the partitions, format went fine, so did the initial install... Once it rebooted however my luck changed.

The part where it says "installing windows" hangs indefinately. The green bar in the lower left gets to ~60% and just stops (it says "35 minutes remaining) the mouse disappears and the green dots on the lower right stop moving.

I tried re-formatting twice and gave up. I'm sure it's a driver issue somewhere, the USB system shuts down (mouse turns off). Windows vista did something similair when I re-installed it but it pushed on through rather quickly.

Some specs:

Vista Home Basic 32bit
AMD X2 Dual Core 4200
I think it's an ASUS mobo, but not sure...
SATA CD drive and Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Sata Hard Drive
ATI X1300 GFX Card
Onboard lan / sound cards


Questions: Anyone know how to install xp on a dell 531s?
Any ideas on drivers I might need to load before formatting?


Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Andy

 

[cprince]

check to see if your XP install disk is still good. You shouldn't need any driver for the installation other than the hard drive controller, which you do because it saw your hard drive. I recommend going back to Vista, but this time uninstall all the garbage that dell put on your computer. Your computer will run much faster after that. Also, how much RAM do you have? You need 2GB in order to run Vista smoothly.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Will vista reinstall? If not then you have a hardware issue. Try doing a memory test. www.goldmemory.cz

 

[sodamninsane]

vista re-installed. It's only got a gig which I thought would be fine... vista runs great without all the dell crap + random other junk that it came with... I was actually suprised... I've messed around with it on the internet and stuff.. just can't believe that vista takes up 700 meg of ram at idle... freakin ridiculous.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Originally posted by: sodamninsane
vista re-installed. It's only got a gig which I thought would be fine... vista runs great without all the dell crap + random other junk that it came with... I was actually suprised... I've messed around with it on the internet and stuff.. just can't believe that vista takes up 700 meg of ram at idle... freakin ridiculous.

It doesnt take this much actually, it caches data much more than XP which is a good thing. While XP just lets the ram sit idle vista caches stuff. When something needs it, the cache is let go and the program gets it.

Ram is worthless if it isnt used