I have an hp laptop with vista pre-installed. I want to downgrade it to xp because i prefer xp so i bought an xp sp3 cd from the store. I heard i would have problems with drivers. what exactly would i need to do? would driveragent install all the necessary drivers once i install xp?

The issue is this. Microsoft discouraged OEM vendors from selling computers with WinXP. They could do that through the volume licensing program. So, you have new hardware that may never had any drivers written for WinXP. Some of the hardware can be configured using chipset drivers from the manufacturer of the chipset. Some of the hardware is common to older computers so WinXP drivers are available. In the case of laptop computers the problem drivers seem to be the HD sound and WiFi. If you are lucky, your laptop is one of the units that had an option to come with WinXP pre-installed. However, those are not usually the latest models. Post the exact model and/or go to the HP site and see if WinXP drivers are available for all the hardware. If you elect to go to WinXP I suggest you leave the Vista recovery partition alone. Also, create the restore disks while you still have Vista running.

A lot of HP laptops have XP drivers - just go to their site & check. Also as OtheHill said, if HP do not have drivers, you may be able to find them from their manufacturer's sites - you'd need to know what you're looking for, so look in vista's device manager to find out (graphics, sound & network most needed).

its an hp pavilion dv5-1225 ill try the hp site now

Here is the link for that series. Seems like you are in luck. Download ALL the drivers and burn them to CDR. http://h20180.www2.hp.com/apps/Look...

couldnt find anything useful on the hp site. im a bit clueless on the whole thing. can anyone tell my exactly what i would need to do?

Thanks for that. So after i download all the drivers onto a cd, i run the win XP cd on my laptop and then install the drivers and that's it?