Hey guys, I recently installed Vista Ultimate on my laptop, and I want to go back to XP, but the installation disk has blacked out the option "Install Windows XP". Any ideas how to reinstall windows XP? Help greatly appreciated Nimz

Of course you can't install XP from within Vista. However, you could boot from the XP disc & wipe the Vista drive or partition then install XP.

sabertooth, could you run me through exactly HOW you do that, I tried restarting my comp with the XP disc in it and it gave me an option "boot from CD" so I clicked on that and it just gave me OS boot screen with the only option to boot as Windows Vista. I dunno' I'm definetly doing something wrong. Please Help! Nimz

let the boot process stay at boot from cd you should eventually get 'press any key to boot cd'' if not, the disk is not bootable

Yeah that was a big mistake going to Vista on that system especially when you only have 512mb of ram plus the addtional pc ram that your igp is sucking off from it and your left with even lower then what Vista requires in ram. is your XP disc an OEM or a full retail version? is your bios set on boot from a CD? Go to the Bios. Restart your pc and either hit F2 or delete repeatedly until you find a bios menu then click on Standard CMOS features or Stadnard CMOS setup and look for the boot order, make sure the first boot device is set on CD if it isn't then change it and set it on CD, then hit escape and hit f10 to save and exit. Now put your Windows XP CD in. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ OC 2.7ghz 4GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 7900GT SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0+1 Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

thanks... yeah I just did something wrong before, now I've got the boot from CD screen up, but someone was saying before that I need to boot from CD then "wipe the Vista drive". I believe I'm getting an option from boot from CD to just install the XP OS, why or do I need to wipe the vista drive? Nimz

You don't. XP will reformat over whatever you have already on your hard drive. Wiping the hard drive is normally good for if you are going to sell your hard drive and you want the disc to be clean of any past info, so a program like killdisk will rewrite your hard drive over with 101010's. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ OC 2.7ghz 4GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 7900GT SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0+1 Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI