Hi All, I have purchased new SONY laptop with VISTA pre installed. But now i want to install XP. I have XP cd. Can you please suggest the steps to uninstall vista & install xp. Appreciate your reply. Regards, Baddi

To install XP on machines on which Vista is pre-installed could be tricky because new machines come with SATA HDD for which Win XP has no native drivers in the install media. First of all, check BIOS to see if HDD operational mode is COMPATIBILITY. If not - it could be in AHCI mode - make it COMPATIBILITY mode because it is not possible to install XP without SATA drivers integrated into Win XP install media. Where in BIOS to look for COMPATIBILITY / AHCI mode, or a different terminology, depends on M/B maker. Regards SuatCINI

Ok. Thx a lot for immediate response. Can you please tell me how to check if HDD operational mode is COMPATIBILITY or not.

Can you get into BIOS ? While your notebook is restarting, you have to press a key, such as F2 or Delete or another key on the keyboard. This is dependent on M/B maker of your notebook. Sony Vaio documentation could help. Or just look at the screen when BIOS info appears. It should be indicated somewhere, either on the left bottom of the screen or on another corner. Before sign of that key disappears, you have to press it several times and that takes you into BIOS. There are several pages of BIOS. How you browse through pages will be indicated on each BIOS page. The setting you will be looking for may be termed COMPATIBILITY or IDE mode or AHCI or SATA. In order to be able to install XP, it should be IDE or COMPATIBILITY. SATA or AHCI, which are better communication protocols, do not let you install XP because XP has no drivers for them. They are new standards and they did not exist when XP developed. Do not forget to save changes before exiting BIOS. Otherwise it will be of no use unless you save the changes in BIOS. Regards SuatCINI

Ok.This info is really good. Thx a lot once again

Before doing anything with your PC, I suggest you create a restore DVD for your Vista installation if Restore DVD is not supplied by Sony. You may wish to re-install Vista at a later time. To me, Vista is much better than XP and I feel sorry to show you the way to install XP. I suggest you should wait for Win 7 before wiping Vista. Win XP has limited support life. Anyway, once BIOS is configured to your liking, restart your notebook with XP CD in the DVD tray. By the way, if DVD-ROM drive is not the first boot device, make it so. Then with the XP CD, you have to remove / delete the volume on which Vista is installed ( most probably C: ). You may leave the other volumes, if any. Hope the above helps. Regards SuatCINI

I'm not a huge fan of Vista but if you have a large enough HDD & can spare the space, I suggest you repartition the drive & keep Vista intact on a relatively small partition (25GB?). Then install XP on the 2nd partition to create a Vista/XP dual boot setup. How to dual boot Vista and XP (with Vista installed first) -- the step-by-step guide with screenshots