I have read various topics about Vista, none really helped me (I'm not that PC literate

All I want to do is remove Vista from my laptop,
I dont want to shrink it,
I dont want to back anything up from it,
There is nothing I want to keep from Vista

All I really want is a easy step by step way of getting rid of the darn thing

Can anyone please help ?

I've tried formatting the drive (wouldnt let me)

I've tried booting from disc (wouldnt lket me, vista is on the sytem)

I've tried deleting files (that never worked either

I've tried SAFE MODE (but I dont have a clue what that is supposed to do)

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE,

Can anyone give me a step by step (idiots) guide to uninstalling Vista and installing my XP Pro

I dont know what I'm doing wrong or if I'm even doing anything right

I cant find any simple way iof doing it in these forums

At the moment my laptop is just a very expensive paper weight, and its driving me up the wall

(I've hads to walk away from it or I'm going to end up binning it, so please help or advise)

vista i suppose :)

Come on. How long have you used it?

pepsi666,

What is the make and model number of your computer ??
Kindest Regards,
Rick P. ♥ :)

you can use acronis disk director suite 10 bootable cd. you've to make one within vista. first install acronis (10 not 9). create a bootable rescue disk within acronis. then boot your laptop using this acronis cd. if it detects a primary partition, you're in luck. just delete the partition. (I HOPE YOU'VE ALREADY BACKED UP TO YOUR THUMB DRIVE OR DVDRW OR CDRWs ANY DATA YOU HAVE IN VISTA!) now create a new partition the size you want and choose ntfs. commit your changes. remove the acronis cd and replace it with your xp bootable install cd. i hope you get success.

i've got my own problems. i hope someone here will help me. sorry to post my q here pepsi666 but my fresh post got deleted by admin. i hope you'd understand and help me out.

i'm using vista ultimate and office 2003. when i was using xp, o2k3 worked fine. but now everytime i click my mouse and select something, or do any activity with keyboard (like win+r, win+e etc) windows pops up a message box saying "windows is configuring microsoft office professional edition 2003". the box does some configuring (god only knows what!) and then disappears after a minute. this happens everytime i do some activity (mouse right click or win+e or starting firefox or calculator or just about anything). all my o2k3 setup files are in c:\msocache. i've tried using ccleaner to wipe out all traces but this annoyance persists. office 2003 repair also didn't solve my problem. though my system is working fine, but it's imaginable how annoying it is to withstand the face of "configuring..." everytime you start doing your innocent wordprocessing or spreadsheet calculations.

can anyone please help me out?

I dont have anything to back up, I havent done anything with it, just fired up the laptop, then saw it was vista, tried getting rid of it, failed miserably
I have all the driver saved to a disc (including the disc it came with, labeled DRIVERS)

So it should be pretty straight forward

I dont want a partition to save Vista,
I dont need the recovery disc that I can reload Vista
All I want to do is see my version of Vista diappear into laptop hell

Is that so hard to ask for ?

A simple step by step guide to unistalling Vista and installing XP Pro

@ALL,

Before the discussion gets out of hand, the Dell Inspiron 1720 XP drivers are here. Just select XP instead of Vista in the first dropdown box.

http://support.dell.com/suppor.....;TabIndex=

If (pepsi666) has a genuine copy of XP on a CD, it would be fairly simple to revert his machine back to XP.

@pepsi666,

(1) Have you ever done a Clean Install of XP before ??
(2) Have you ever made a sliptream CD before ??

Please post back.
Kindest Regards,
Rick P. ♥ :)

@whs,

I haven't seen you post in awhile. Hope all is well. Was beginning to worry.

The drivers are all their and fortunately the Chipset is Intel.

Unfortunately pepsi666 says "(I'm not that PC literate)" so he is going have to have a friend in UK help him or have to live with something he absolutely despises and can't use.

A bit unfair but that appears to be the situation.
Kindest Regards,
Rick P. ♥ :)

@whs,

It's just "different strokes for different folks" I guess.

My wife, who keeps track of our meager finances, runs "her" machine on Win2K and won't let me dare change it as she feels comfortable with the O/S and her programs.

I run XP3 on the network and I'm not about to invest our meager savings in a big O/S Switchover when I can run the "heck" out of these machines and beat any Vista configuration hands down in both speed plus agility.

I'll leave that switchover for my wife's second husband to do after I'm gone (LOL) (LOL).
Kindest Regards,
Rick P. ♥ :)