PC Advice needed
 

Looking at all the laptops on the market at the moment they all seem to be Vista equiped. My daughter has just got one for Christmas and a few things we wanted to put on it will not work with Vista.
Now, my question is, is there a site somewhere which will let XP requirement stuff run with Vista??
Or, is it easy to downgrade (if that is what you could call it) to XP from Vista.

Re: PC Advice needed
 

dunno

but, if you get any problems, turn it off & back on

works for me




happy xmas
xx

Re: PC Advice needed
 

Re: PC Advice needed
 

Can you still buy pc's with xp on, I hear many bad things about vista....

Re: PC Advice needed
 

You need to specify at the time of purchase that you would like it to be upgraded from Vista to XP.

With Dell, on their desktops, it is £60 to go from Vista Home to XP Pro (no cost for XP Home, but Pro is just that little bit more.

With a laptop, it can be a bit of a pain to "retro-fit" XP on it due to specialist drivers required.

That said its not impossible, you could MAYBE get away with taking it back and playing dumb and say "this software doesnt work, make it work, oh you cant, then my money back please - it works fine in XP, and when I ordered it I was not warned that the software I need to run on it would not".

For the last bit you could always slip Hovis £5 and have him go in and say "Dun wurk, fixit" :)

Re: PC Advice needed
 

It will be downgradeabe, but it won't probably be a very easy process.

it'll depend on whether the manufacturer has released drivers for the hardware in your Laptop that work with XP, they might have they might not have, if they havent then you might find lots of stuff does work properly, which may or may not mean you would be in a worse position than you are now.

As for Vista, we've had two laptops now with it installed, not had one problem with it, apart from the fact that I find it awkward to use as I do alot of stuff in an old school way. i.e. with cmd or from the run cmd and I also I find all the useful stuff is now buried away undereath and load of GUI stuff that I'd rather just turn off.

Trouble is Microsoft, dont want you to go back to XP so they'll make it hard for you to do so. One guy in our office went back to Xp from Vista in our office took him 3 days to get everything working again.

If you dont have much experience of I.T. its not something I'd recommend you do unless you like pain, greif and tinkering.

Re: PC Advice needed
 

Its Simple all you have to do is go on the internet,go to the products web site and download Vista upgrade, i had to do this for my printer 99% of all stuff now is compatable or upgradeable.:D

Re: PC Advice needed
 

If you want to have a working laptop and not a door stop I suggest the following

- Format the harddrive i.e. wipe off it the Vista installation and anything else
- Get XP Pro and install it on the now clean drive

How you get XP Pro is up to you, options are get a legit copy (ie pay for it) or get a dodgy copy

Re: PC Advice needed
 

most manafacturers will provide xp drivers for the hardware, but you will have to use your own copy of XP and should it need to be repaired the manafacturer will put your original vista install back on. that being said....

vista isnt as bad as it seems, i have it on my laptop (preinstalled) and i havent had a problem with it yet. it would be worth looking to see if the software you need use has had updates for vista.

another option you have is to get a macbook (tho i know nothing about macs)

Re: PC Advice needed
 

What exactly does not work with the laptop? Make sure you have the latest drivers and you should be fine. People like to moan about Vista but they are great.