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My wife's HP is on the verge of collapse and we're looking at a new one. We want one with XP and apart from a few expensive machines we've seen in France that still cater for it, only Dell seem to offer it. Phoned Dell UK and they gave me absolutely no help in getting a machine over to France. Will try again tomorrow with a sales rep who gave me a lot of assistance in getting a laptop over last year when she gets back from hols.

Apart from this, what would be the repercusions of buying a laptop with Vista on, wiping it and then loading XP on that came with the laptop that's about to die?

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I would'nt delete Vista, just create a new partition on the drive, install your copy of XP, and you can then boot from either OS. You dont say why you want XP, fear of the unknown maybe :), but having both, you have the option to spend some time finding your way round Vista, you never know you might like it!

And I would buy a clean machine, ( not Dell ), Carrefour, Geant,  all have a good range to choose from.

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We use a lot of adobe and graphics programs, and everyone we've spoken to (and research we've done) suggests keeping to XP as it doesn't hog as much memory as vista does. At the end of the day, it's only an operating system, a tool, and we just want to get on with working without having to learn how to drive again.

Partitioning might be a solution. Might look into that a bit further.

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Get an Apple Mac, load 'bootcamp' and you can then run XP when you need to and get better results with your graphic work.

Regarding Dell UK I contacted them to buy an 'english spec' desktop delivered to france and they said no problem and the delivery would be £30. Perhaps you caught the operator on a bad day..............[:)]

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[quote user="LyndaandRichard"]what would be the repercusions of buying a laptop with Vista on, wiping it and then loading XP on that came with the laptop that's about to die?
[/quote]

It depends on what you actually got. Very often the 'XP' disks that come with PCs nowadays are system restore disks. That means that they are licensed to the original machine. Also, from a practical point of view they are likely to automatically load the drivers for that machine. If you have a retail XP disk then you should be able to load it, assuming that you can find XP drivers for the new laptop.

I believe that for an XP/Vista dual boot arrangement you have to start with XP and add Vista.

I agree that Vista can be horribly annoying. I got it with one of my laptops and I've now bought a book called "Windows Vista Annoyances" which tells you how to beat it into submission. Unfortunately the main apps I need are only available for Windows, otherwise I'd be tempted to go over to Linux.

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Apple Mac. Haven't used one of those in years. Great machines. But again the learning curve to get back into them, new software etc.

re dell, last year I had the same problem so just kept ringing back until an operator actually wanted to do their job and make the sale.

But the ability to revert back to xp ricandjo suggested may also be worth looking at.

Thanks for all the ideas so far though.

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I'm puzzled by what you actualy mean by "laptop on deaths bed", "on the verge of collapse", "about to die" [8-)]

Unless there is something physically wrong with your laptop or it's broken requiring repair then a reinstall of XP will bring it back to good working order. Plonk in a new HD possibly for a bit extra space and to offset the chance of it failing and you will have a machine which is as good if not better than it was on the day you bought it. The big advantage too of course is that all you have to do is reinstall from the disks you have, no worries about Product Activation, drivers etc. and your machine ends up is as it came out of the box.

 

 

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The laptop has been back to Darty twice for repairs (under warranty) and that was in the first year. Firstly the graphics card had shorted and the hd failed, then the screen was replaced and a new battery fitted amongst other things.

It is running very, very slow, we've done all the usual stuff, antivirus, anti spyware etc, ccleaner and the rest. The sound card is cactussed, never plays sounds properly, the mouse on the laptop is worn down to its circuitry, the power lead pops out for 5 seconds and the thing hibernates because the battery is stuffed again, and above all it's an HP! We have already wasted so much time on it that the time has come to call it quits and go for a new one. It has done a hell of a lot of work in the past 2 years.

By the time you spend on a new battery, new mouse, new motherboard (because the sound card on it is stuffed), you might as well buy a new one as they're so cheap, which is where we're at.

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