I'm going shopping for a laptop this weekend. When I buy it I want to format the hard drive and install XP pro on it. Since it will have vista do I just boot up to the XP cd and format and install or is it going to be an all new ball game? Brian

yes, this will wipe vista. if you want to avoid the 'windows tax' altogether, DELL's n Series Notebooks (and desktops) for open source customers come without pre-installed windows: http://www.dell.com/content/product... also, Lenovo offers windows-free systems Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.'

You may have to repartition your whole hard drive first considering it's going to have a second restorer partion on it from the company. I did that for my brothers gateway laptop when I installed XP Pro on his. I have to go into fdisk and delete both partitions and then create a whole partition and then formatted windows xp pro onto there. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz 2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 7900GT SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0+1 Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

also before you do this, make sure youdownlaod all the XP device drivers first like sound card, video card, chipset driver etc. burn them onto a disc. So when you install windows XP you can install those drivers as well. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz 2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 7900GT SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0+1 Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

Thanks for the feedback. I got my new laptop. So far I'm not that impressed with vista after playing around with it for about 6 hours. For now I will keep vista and see if I can get used to it. Brian