Downgrade Vista to Windows XP

Who wouldn't want to run the most "stable" O.S. to date from Microsoft and no we aren't talking about Windows Vista.
I'm talking about Windows XP.
If you want an OS that looks good but crashes a lot then you might want to stay with Vista. Not to mention little support for your software, printers, cameras, joysticks...ect, ect, ect.

Downgrading Vista to Windows XP

The first step you want to take is to make sure you can find drivers for your hardware to work with Windows XP.
Visiting your vendors support site should yield results. Or in the case you have a custom built P.C. You should contact the tech who built it for you or you will have to manually find divers for the components. (This is never much fun) If so you can go to the windows Vista Control panel and View the device manager and write down the device names and with lots of Google searching you should find what you need.

Burn the downloaded drivers to a cd or move them to a thumb drive for use after the installation of XP.

Next we want to backup any data you may have already accumulated on Vista. Several cd's, dvd's or a nice size thumb drive should do the trick.

Now we want to purchase a copy of XP or maybe if your lucky you bought a copy of XP in the past. If this is the case we'll talk about activating XP over the phone later in this article.

Boot from the XP cd, if your PC doesn't boot form the cd you may need to change the boot order in the system bios.

When prompted to press any key to boot form the cd do so.
After booting into the XP install you'll be prompted with 3 choices. Choose *To set up Windows XP now, press ENETR.

Then F8 to agree to the Licensing Agreement
After XP searches for the Hard drive to install to you need to choose what partition to install on, in my opinion deleting all partitions and starting fresh with the XP install is best.

Format the file Partition using the NTFS file system (Quick)
Then F to format.

Now lets wait while it formats and copies files. (Coffee anyone?)

After the install finishes boot into XP as normal and start by installing the chip set driver you downloaded earlier first. Then installing any other drivers you need to.
After we get the network driver working correctly we can download anything we missed.

Installing any software you have will come next, and I bet you it's compatible with Windows XP.

Lastly you want to copy the personal data you backed up form the Vista system to your new and improved Windows Xp PC.