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Guess what, you do have certain downgrade rights from Vista to Windows XP

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Darwin:
mwb1100 - this is true of many OEM installations of XP, on notebooks anyway. I've been wondering about this myself as my OEM discs are for Compaq (and HP?) and Gateway so I have a wee bit of choice. I've been considering going this route as I think it advisable to actually get a machine with Vista preinstalled (all too soon XP is going to be old news, whether we like it or not, and newer software packages/updates will increasingly optimized for Vista) and to take advantage of some of the new hardware that's available. However, I'd still like to be able to downgrade to XP without having to spend mone on a copy and I'm *hoping* that this will work. I'm just waiting to find out if there are any curveballs that might crop up - BIOS level changes that might render the BIOS recognition feature in XP incompatible with a machine designed for Vista. Yes, I am paranoid (and it shows!).

PS I've been looking at DELL because I can still order a machine with XP preinstalled. However, I would rather have a copy of Vista AND a copy of XP, even if I don't intend to run Vista for a while yet.

Carol Haynes:
You may well find that the OEM discs you have will only install on the original hardware supplied with the CDs - sometimes the OEM company modifies Windows to check the hardware as windows starts so that it can't be installed elsewhere.

f0dder:
And you may find that the license key on the back of your machine can't actually be used as a working license key - I got that when I tried installing a *clean* version of Vista Business instead of the preloaded Lenovo version which had so much shit preloaded that it would have taken days to get rid of.

Wordzilla:
I got that when I tried installing a *clean* version of Vista Business instead of the preloaded Lenovo version which had so much shit preloaded that it would have taken days to get rid of.
--- End quote ---

ROFL. True, and it happens to every Thinkpad.

f0dder:
And the other thinkpad (or whatever ibm/lenovo/whatever calls them now) (that I didn't try to reinstall, after the mess with the first) after a windows update suddenly tells me that the product activation key is invalid. Great. Good thing I purchased two XP OEM copies so I can rid of that piece of shit.

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