Try reformatting your hard drive and installing WinXP from scratch. Works
fine. Go up to the manufacturers website, and download all the system
drivers for XP for your computer first, and save them along with any other
data on an external hard drive, so you can install/reinstall the stuff after
you bring up XP. I have done this a lot for customers, and it works fine.

K

"Jethro" <Jethro@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:9D92BD79-0138-44C3-AD95-D9967E8F3F93@microsoft.com...[color=blue]
>I am in the same situation. I recently purchased a new "cheapo" laptop for
> my son which came pre-installed with Vista. My home computer is over 4
> years
> old (Pentium 4 2GHZ with 1GB RAM). The new laptop is Pentium M Celeron
> 1.6GHZ with 1GB RAM. Initially after windows login I compare the memory
> of
> each system, the old desktop with Win XP Home is at 219MB, while the new
> laptop with Vista Home Basic is over 400MB. When my son tries to play the
> game Sims 2, the old desktop is running with the game at 50% CPU and
> memory
> for the game is around 200MB, on the new laptop the game is at 100% CPU
> and
> memory for the game is around 400MB. The game manufacturer says it does
> not
> officially support Vista yet, but running the game in Win XP compatibility
> mode doesn't work either. I feel that this laptop will be of marginal
> performance under Windows Vista, but might actually be a good performer
> under
> Win XP. I came to this forum to investigate downgrading to XP. I was
> surprised at how many posts there are with the same question. It sounds
> like
> Microsoft really has us over a barrel with all the licencing bull****. It
> also does not surprise me that they expect me to go out and buy another
> Windows license to downgrade and essentially leave my new Windows Vista
> license unused! These cheap PC manufactures should have never started
> using
> an OS before the PC hardware was capable of running it. Microsoft should
> have never created such a bloated OS that uses up most of todays PC
> resources, but that is typical MS. They have done the same thing with
> every
> new OS that they created, always staying one step ahead of the hardware
> MFGs.
> It does end up pushing the hardware MFGs to make higher performance PC's,
> but on the other hand it keeps the price of new PC's high as well. I have
> often wonderered how my new PC running XP would have operated under Win
> 2000,
> but Microsoft closes that option as well by not providing support for
> older
> OS's. Oh well, I guess that is life (at least Microsoft's version of it)
> I
> might as well get used to it. Maybe I will try Virtual PC, but I don't
> have
> much hope for that either since the laptop does not have much resource
> left
> over after Vista boots up.
>
> Frustrated Hillbilly.[/color]