Upgrade from Vista to XP

[Mick_L]

Hi Geeks,

A little help for a friend of my son please.

This poor kid purchased an Acer Computer from a chain retailer, and came pre-installed with Vista Basic, and only 1 Gb of RAM. He's had quite a gutful of Vista.  Question is, can he do an XP install on this machine - I think I heard or read somewhere that its not really as simple as re-format and start from scratch.

Personally, I am thinking dual boot and install Ubuntu.

[The Radio Geek]

Hi there Mick,

Thanks for your question - we answered it on the radio today and I thought I would post it as well.  (something about you snubbing us and not listening today?)

Anway - the short answer is Yes, you can do it.  However, I urge that you should do a heap of preparation first.  Download all the driver packs from the manufacturer (Acer) that are listed for XP.  Remember that once you change your original operating system, all the discs that come with your computer are effectively useless. 

On a side-note, Windows 7 is coming along and is getting a few good reviews.  You might want to consider persevering and then jumping up, instead of jumping back.

Cheers,
:)RG

[Mick_L]

Thanks Rob,

I tried to listen to you today, however 612 ABC down here do not take the feed from radio far north!

I'll pass this on to the poor person who is struggling with XP

[Mick_L]

Despite our best advice, the boys decided to have a go at this anyway.

It's going quite well actually, in that they copied the XP drivers for this machine to a CD before they started

The install went okay, but they had no idea how to install the drivers, to do important things like get the network card going etc. So the boys dragged the whole computer around to here, where there are working net enabled computers.

This allowed research, and behold, the project computer went online, and are now picking away at the post installation configuration tasks.

There is growing likelihood of success.