I have a Co-worker who has a Gateway tower (moo) w/ Vista as it's OS. <gag> He and I are more familiar w/XP and (personally) prefer it. If a copy of XP could be procured, how difficult (or can it be done) to put XP onto the tower in question?
Fus
Can it be done?
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Fusion
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Can it be done?
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Krom
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Easy with a little planning. The most important thing to do is to burn a CD with all relevant XP drivers for the machine before you start (copying them to a USB thumb drive works too). Or at a minimum burn the LAN drivers (you can download the rest directly to the machine once those are installed). If you are a little more ambitious you can use nlite to slipstream them on to a new XP CD/DVD along with service pack 3 and whatever else you like which can bypass a couple later steps at a cost of more setup work before you get to installing.
The other important thing to remember is to boot the computer directly from the XP disk, do not attempt to install from inside vista since it won't let you format the drive if you do. And when prompted if you want to format or not select quick-format the partition, do not \"full\" format it because that takes hours on most drives.
In a unlikely worst case scenario you could run into a problem from one of the things Vista supports by default, AHCI hard drive configurations, that XP does not support by default. In that case you would have to load the chipset RAID/AHCI driver in XP setup. If no hard drive is found during the install process you have three options:
Slipstream the AHCI driver on to an XP CD.
Use the F6 option to load a third party RAID driver from a floppy disk while setup is initializing.
Or to enter BIOS and turn the hard drive controllers to IDE compatibility mode.
The slipstreamed CD option is more work initially but just automatically works once needed with no user intervention required. The F6 floppy option is the easiest and quickest for most people that have a working floppy drive. The BIOS option is the least amount of effort overall but it does negatively impact hard drive performance and in most cases cannot be reversed as it would render XP unbootable.
For details on how to do all the slipstreaming if you pick that method: google for nlite and tutorials on how to use it. The program initially appears more complicated than it really is and a good tutorial is enough to complete the entire process you would need to use it for.
The other important thing to remember is to boot the computer directly from the XP disk, do not attempt to install from inside vista since it won't let you format the drive if you do. And when prompted if you want to format or not select quick-format the partition, do not \"full\" format it because that takes hours on most drives.
In a unlikely worst case scenario you could run into a problem from one of the things Vista supports by default, AHCI hard drive configurations, that XP does not support by default. In that case you would have to load the chipset RAID/AHCI driver in XP setup. If no hard drive is found during the install process you have three options:
Slipstream the AHCI driver on to an XP CD.
Use the F6 option to load a third party RAID driver from a floppy disk while setup is initializing.
Or to enter BIOS and turn the hard drive controllers to IDE compatibility mode.
The slipstreamed CD option is more work initially but just automatically works once needed with no user intervention required. The F6 floppy option is the easiest and quickest for most people that have a working floppy drive. The BIOS option is the least amount of effort overall but it does negatively impact hard drive performance and in most cases cannot be reversed as it would render XP unbootable.
For details on how to do all the slipstreaming if you pick that method: google for nlite and tutorials on how to use it. The program initially appears more complicated than it really is and a good tutorial is enough to complete the entire process you would need to use it for.
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Fusion
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Krom,
Booting from the XP CD I figged was a ness step. I know nothing about Vista <gag> so the lan drivers you speak of I have no idea where to look. the other programs us mentioned Sounds more complicated than I wanna deal with.
Slightly off topic. I want to give him avg as a Anti virus, but he has Norton Internet security preinstalled. Is it better to use the NIS over the free ver of AVG? (Had to give him Spybot S@D to remove 100 references of spyware off his tower, as well as Spyware Blaster.
Fus
Booting from the XP CD I figged was a ness step. I know nothing about Vista <gag> so the lan drivers you speak of I have no idea where to look. the other programs us mentioned Sounds more complicated than I wanna deal with.
Slightly off topic. I want to give him avg as a Anti virus, but he has Norton Internet security preinstalled. Is it better to use the NIS over the free ver of AVG? (Had to give him Spybot S@D to remove 100 references of spyware off his tower, as well as Spyware Blaster.
Fus
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