Vista to xp on laptop problem

[cpembo]

Ive recently bought a compaq c765em its a celeron 550 with 1gb ram , the Os is preinstalled and is vista home basic, no cds are provided all the recovery info and drivers are on a seperate partition (11gb).

Im using the laptop for surfing net and some light gaming.

I feel i would get better performance and battery life by going to XP , ive nothing against vista , in fact i run vista ultimate on my main pc id just like to give the laptop a boost and i know vista is resource hungry so think XP will speed it up . Ive an original of xp home which used to be on my desktop which i intend putting on the laptop.

My main problem is that of drivers, would i be able to download everything from the web? also do i need to reformat and partiton the hard drive? - its not a problem to do so but if i leave the recovery partition will it just try to reinstall on startup?

Any help is much appreciated .

[jamesb21222]

well the safe thing to do for drivers is go to the manufacturer website BEFORE you try xp and burn your drivers on a cd. im not sure if the recovery partition will like the xp though. i tried it on my bro's newish laptop that had vista and it didnt work out. (the partitions werent showing on the table). just pop in the xp cd and see what happens.

as far as reformatting the hard drive for xp, unless you want to save space, you dont really need to do it. (plus you dont lose your stuff.)

[#43 fan]

There are probably drivers for your hardware for XP, considering XP is still one (if not the) of the most used OS's on the market.

[osprey4]

It does not appear HP are providing full driver support for XP. So you're basically on your own looking for third-party drivers. You should definitely create an image of the recovery partition and understand how to use it before you proceed with the XP installation.

Going from Vista to XP also requires some "trickeration", since the XP installation routine will examine the hard drive and not allow installation to proceed when it detects Vista. So you should take a close look at Regress Without Reformatting before you start.

[cpembo]

Ok an update on this, Ive had a look and im pretty confident i can get the drivers i need and have created some recovery discs just in case .

Problem is that when i try to install xp (boot from cd) it tells me there is no hard drive detected and wont install. My intention was to format the drive (its currently in 2 partition and i want just one ) from the xp cd then install , but xp just says no Hard drive connected and thats as far as i can go.

Any ideas?

[cpembo]

Any ideas ? Its really bugging me , I know that if i could get xp on then the laptop would be much more useful for me and a fair bit quicker .