Question about downgrading Vista to XP on a laptop.

[leglez]

My friends laptop is running really slow and it has Vista on it and he is having me install XP on it for him tonight. I have never really done any work on laptops or vista so I have a question about downgrading. If I just install XP and get rid of Vista will everything still work on the laptop? Will I need to download the drivers for anything or will it just automatically set everything up?

 

[johnpombrio]

Watch out! My son's Dell came with Vista on it and I tried to downgrade to XP for him last fall. Dell said "Sure!" but did not bother to tell me that there were NO DRIVERS FOR XP FOR EITHER THE SOUND NOR WIRELESS NETWORK PORT FOR THAT MOTHERBOARD. So I had a machine that ran XP fine except that I could not get on a wireless network or play any sounds. So back to Vista I went with my son griping a lot. In the long run though, a slow Vista laptop will be a slow XP laptop. If there is room for more memory, that would probably speed things up more than the switch of operationg systems.
BTW, turns out that my son doesn't even notice anymore which operating system he is using nor does he really care!

 

[leglez]

Ok thanks whenever he gets here I am going to try giving the manufacter a call and see.

 

[RebateMonger]

With XP, drivers for laptop devices ALMOST NEVER "just come up". Each one must be downloaded and installed.

Before removing Vista, make printouts of the entire Device Manager, so you know EXACTLY what devices are installed.