chaning from vista to xp pro in a laptop?

[nev]

Hey guys,
I bought a compaq presario T-2330 laptop from bestbuy today and its got 1.7GHz, 120GB HD space and 1GB ram. The problem is that it runs on windows vista and the salesman from bestbuy told me that if I change it to wondows xp pro, a lot of stuff wont work. I'm thinking that that isnt true.

Vista eats a ton of ram....which sucks

If I wanted to change the whole OS from vista to XP pro, how would I do it?
Thanks
Nev

 

[Kharn]

Some of the new drivers are Vista specific from some manufactures.

 

[Peter.Cort]

first off you can do it because you can usually find a driver for most anything.

with that being said, it is a ***** to do. so first off i would say write down all the devices you will need to get drivers for, and get all the drivers before hand and put them on a fd or a cd and that way you can get up and running in under a few hours.

 

[Kharn]

I was talking about the OEM official drivers.

 

[Peter.Cort]

oh yeah, official drivers yes, but when there's a will theres a way and usually the manufacturer will have xp drivers for their stuff.

 

[Black Falcon 921]

I don't know thats a lot of work for all that might want to spend a little more on extra memory instead of reformatting and doing a clean install. Side not though I have a gig orf ram in my laptop running vista and it seems to do fairly well, no problems as of yet.

 

[Jayce]

Take a look around. I lucked out when I downgraded from Vista to XP Pro SP2 and I found that somebody had uploaded an entire zip file of every driver I needed specifically for those users with this laptop that wanted to downgrade. Perhaps you could find something like that, too.

However, you may just be stuck finding out each piece of hardware you have and going to the manufacturer's site looking for the drivers. It can be tedious... but I thought it was worth it.

 

[Kubel]

Assuming you bought a Presario C700T which is their only model that ships exclusively with a T2330, you will have to do a little digging to find the proper drivers, but it shouldn't be too hard.

I suggest resizing your current partition to make room for an XP partition, and dual boot. That way, if it takes you a few weeks to find all the drivers and get them working smoothly, you won't be stuck with a partially working laptop.

Then spend some time Googling. Like Jayce said, the community is where you need to look because the manufacturer won't help you.

And one more thing, Vista doesn't eat a ton of RAM. It may look like it is hogging up nearly all your memory because of SuperFetch. Microsoft figures that unused RAM is wasted RAM, so it pre-loads things it thinks you will use so they start up faster. All modern operating systems do this to some degree, and Microsoft does it fairly aggressively in Vista. So it's not really something to worry too much about. Whether you have 512MB or 4GB, Vista will want to find a use for all of if. I do suggest, though, that you upgrade to 2GB, regardless of whether you decide to use Vista or XP.

Good luck!

 

[nev]

Thanks for the responses, guys! I'm not a big tech guy and it seems like downgrading to XP pro is going to be a pain. I guess I'll just upgrade the ram to 2GB. The guy from Best Buy told me that the memory stick will cost $30 but will cost $40 to fit it! I've installed memory sticks in desktops before,...is it different in a laptop?

Thanks
Nev

 

[Apokalipse]

You can find drivers from the HP website:
Notebook PCs