Laptop OS question

fish99 · 4 Jan 2008 at 20:21

Hi,

My laptop came with Vista pre-installed but no CD/DVD to reinstall it. What I want to know is - if I take Vista off and put XP on, have I then lost my Vista license? The product key seems to be viewable through the control panel.

Thanks,
Simon,

fish99 · 5 Jan 2008 at 23:35

Thanks. It's a Fujitsu Siemes Amilo Li1818. I've found a 930 mb folder on the HDD that looks like a recovery folder, and then a 2.5 GB folder that looks pretty much like the Vista install CD contents. If I backup the vista install folder and write down my serial (which was indeed on the underneath of the laptop on the COA sticker) should that be enough to get Vista back on should it be necessary?

Any other issues I might bump into? Once I've backed everything up I want to reset the drive to a single partition and format, since Fujitsu split it into 2 partitions which I don't like. Don't think that should be a problem though. How about something like there being an activation limit on that serial number or something like that? Vista came pre-activated.

fish99 · 6 Jan 2008 at 03:54

Well I feel pretty dumb now

Just had a look and yes it did come with a Vista DVD. It says recovery disc on it, but I'm pretty sure it's the exact same thing that's on the hard-drive (which I've had to use once so I know what it does), which restores your drive to the exact state it was in when the laptop was new. In fact it says as much on the disc.

So that's all great, I can try XP and if it's not a big improvement just put vista back on. I really don't like Vista, especially on a fairly modest laptop.

Thanks very much for the help

fish99 · 8 Jan 2008 at 18:11

Sadly I didn't get on at all. Since the HDD is SATA, and sadly the SATA controller isn't recognized by XP setup (it's the Intel Matrix Storage Manager), it just says there's no hard-drives in the computer and won't install. I know you can get round this with either a USB-floppy drive (xp setup will only look for drivers on drive A) which I don't have, or by using something like nLite to make a customized XP install CD including needed SATA driver, but I had lost the will to live by the time I found that out (and I had no blank CDs)

Don't assume this will be the case with all SATA controllers though, I had no problems installing XP on my desktop.

I'm sure I'll get round to trying it again when I get some CDs.

fish99 · 12 Jan 2008 at 04:26

Got it sorted now. It was actually easy to integrate the SATA drivers into an XP bootable cd-image using nLite, and from that point everything went smoothly.

Now typing this from XP, and god it's so much quicker. Boot up is a lot quicker, but it's not just boot-up, XP doesn't sit there for 2 mins after boot-up chugging away on the HDD for no reason like Vista did. Part of the HDD was also took up with a hidden recovery partition, which I've deleted so I also have the full 160GB available now in a single partition. All drivers seem to be working spot on - of course it's vital to check drivers are available for your laptop hardware before doing this.

Disc performance seems quicker, everything opens quicker and runs better. Wireless network now connects within a few seconds of the system booting rather than several minutes under Vista (and half the time it didn't used to connect at all). As for the other benefits (I'm hoping some games which are listed as working with intel 945GM but didn't work under Vista, will work under XP) I'll only be able to answer that once I've tried them. Other things like battery life, again too early to say.

Very happy to be free of Vista though. I'll post back more about benefits/drawbacks after a longer period to assess things.

edit: Half-Life 2 works under XP on 945GM whereas it would crash under Vista. Sims 2 much better framerate. Cool

2nd edit:HL2 does still crash, but not until the 2nd load (after jumping through the window). Might be fixable, I dunno. Don't actually want to play it on my laptop (see sig) so I won't be investing time in finding out. FYI under Vista it crashed a few seconds after a new game was started.