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swapping pre-installed Vista for XP
I have an Acer Aspire L3600 mini PC, a great little second PC but for the
fact that it came with Vista Home Premium pre-installed in a "hidden" part of 'D'. It has a built in facility where 'C' can be wiped completely clean and restored to its factory default condition, data etc on 'D' hopefully being untouched. I don't like Vista much and would prefer to install my full retail version of Win XP on this PC. I don't mind giving up Vista completely. Acer's support is OK as far as it goes but they make it clear that they do NOT recommend this course of action ,saying that they do not support downgrading the unit with anything other than what came pre-installed on the machine. They warn of the risk of "product failure". If the 'downgrade ' to Win XP can technically be done I'm willing to take the risk but need a bit more help on the mechanics of doing it. I have installed OSs on other PCs from scratch but this process, i.e. totally removing a pre-installed OS which is in some hidden and protected part of the hard drive, appears to be rather more involved and I'm way out of my comfort zone! I need help and advice. Acer say that to run XP I will need to create a bootable disk with SATA drivers otherwise Windows will not detect the hard drive when the CD is run. I think I've tracked these down on their download site, at least in the driver download section these were the only ones to show up. What's come up are a total of 6 for Chipset, Audio, Lan, Modem, VGA and Wireless Lan. Each one is in a zipped folder. Out of interest I compared these to the drivers listed for the pre-installed version of Vista. The chipset version number is identical to the XP version but the others have different version numbers and there is a additional TV driver for Vista Home Premium (the L3600 is media centre enabled). So, 1. Are these 6 drivers in fact the SATA drivers Acer are referring to? 2. How do I create the bootable disk they refer to. When I've installed an OS in the past I've used a floppy which was inserted early during the install process when prompted to do so. I don't recall there being 6 separate drivers though. I have an external floppy disk drive and wonder whether this could be used in this case? If not can anyone tell me how to do it and what the procedure is when installing XP. 3. Is the removal of the pre-installed material simply a question of formatting the entire hard drive? I thought of abandoning the idea of having two partitions, 'C' and 'D' and, on this PC, using external drives for all data storage. 4. Is there anything else of which I should be aware? Regards, Bill |
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