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help downgrading from vista to xp

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by asolis, Jul 29, 2007.

  1. asolis

    asolis Member

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    im tired of vista since non of the games i have work on it, so i want to downgrade to xp. I tried intalling xp and when i got to the part where youre supposed to format the partition nothing appears as if i didnt have a hard drive. i have a Gateway GM5457E, what do i need to do???
     
  2. xXxBG

    xXxBG Regular member

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    Does it show anything, like unpartioned space??
     
  3. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    Unfortunately, Downgrading from Vista to XP on a laptop is a very difficult procedure since it usually requires a separate operable PC or partition to do. All I can suggest is to find a recovery CD from an early version of windows and try and reformat the disk that way. Either that, or power the drive up externally and reformat it over USB to a different PC (be careful if you do that)
     
  4. Waymon3X6

    Waymon3X6 Regular member

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    Btw, most pc games work with vista, all you need to do is right click on the shortcut and select "run as administrator"
     
  5. asolis

    asolis Member

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    xXxBG it doesnt show anything

    sammorristhis is not a laptop its a desktop

    Waymon3X6i have need for speed carbon carbon installed and it crashes at the begining when it starts showing the videos, i tried what you said but it doesnt seem to work.
     
  6. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    Ah sorry, must have been thinking of another thread.

    What are the specs of the PC?
     
  7. asolis

    asolis Member

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    Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6320 Each core operates at 1.86 GHz
    Nvidia Geforce 7500LE 512MB
    DVD+-RW
    500GB SATA II
    2048MB DDR2
     
  8. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    asolis


    Go into your bios and disable your hard drive or under boot order choose only your CD Rom and nothing else (it differs by mainboard and bios). That will prevent your hard drive from booting but it will allow you to reformat your hard disk and reinstall XP. Once the installation is done then go back into your bios and enable your hard drive for booting.
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2007
  9. asolis

    asolis Member

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    Sophocles i went into the bios and disabled the hard drive and it still doesnt seem to work, i wasnt able to go under boot order and choose only CD Rom. i couldnt find that choice in the bios.
     
  10. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    asolis

    There is a switch somewhere in your bios that allows you to change the boot order. If you can't remove the hard drive from the boot order then change the order to CD Rom first. The idea is to get your system to read the CD Rom without reading the boot sector on your hard drive which should allow you to reformat and do a reinstall.
     
  11. Waymon3X6

    Waymon3X6 Regular member

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    btw, by looking at your computers specs, your gfx card isnt real good... Sorry to say but I think that may be why NFS-Carbon is crashing in the beginning...

    Check the temps of the card, that could be done with riva tuner. I really think it is your card and not VISTA.

    Have you gotten the latest drivers?
     
  12. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    The 7500LE is indeed a particularly slow Graphics card, but it should still be able to run NFS carbon, albeit slowly.
     
  13. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    The 7500LE is indeed a slow card which in a fast system should be able to play most games with low quality settings. The problem is compounded by the fact that Vista is also a resource hungry OS that can further slow graphics results by another 15% to 20%. If your only problem is the fact that your card isn't pushing enough frames then a faster card can fix that.

    My laptop running Vista Premium has a 1.83 Core 2 duo, 2 gigs of Ram, and a 256 meg Nvidia GeForce 7600 and I haven't even considered running games on it. I also have to admit that there are times when I've considered removing vista and installing XP on it, but since I use it largely for word processing and online applications related to employment I figured why bother.

    For gaming I use my main system which has a Core 2 Duo E6700@3.6 Ghz, 2 gigs of Ram, and an ATI X1950XT, which does just fine.


     
  14. mrman

    mrman Regular member

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    You should also insure that you are able to find drivers for all of your OEM parts on there that are compatable with XP

    I know some of the machines made by Hewlet packard do not give any drivers for XP and will all have to somehow be sources manually which can be very tidious.
     
  15. Waymon3X6

    Waymon3X6 Regular member

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    Yea, I got an agp system with a gecube x1950xt and it works great.

    It's the fastest card out there for agp.
     
  16. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    So it all worked out for you at last?
     
  17. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    No way to know if things worked out or not, asolis has yet to indicate that, but if he doesn't respond in a day or so then it is probable.
     
    Last edited: Jul 31, 2007
  18. Waymon3X6

    Waymon3X6 Regular member

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    Well I just got back from europe, and then the first thing I did was turn on my computer and play bf2, now I play at 1280x960 @75hrz and mostly medium and high settings and get a decent 25-35fps, so I guess it works...

    Btw this was after I reseated the cooler (3rd time i believe), put some as5 on it and installed the bronze heatsinks onto the memory chips..

    Pretty weird that it works now though....
     
  19. asolis

    asolis Member

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    hey well i tried a program called DBAN which was supposed to wipeout the entire hard drive, it took like about 3 hours and 50 minutes to do. But at the end it still did the same thing. i even tried disabling the hard drive in the bios but nothing, the same. so then i just installed vista again. now i was able to install the nvidia driver and the game didnt crash anymore. I have to put the game in medium setting, but i guess its alright untill i buy a new graphics card. Thanks to all for your responses.
     
  20. barricade

    barricade Guest

    You need to get the RAID driver for your motherboard. Get that from the manufacturer's website of your computer. You are gonna have to put the driver on a floppy ( I hope you still got one of these! ) When you go to install XP, keep pressing F6 right when the blue install screen pops up, it says "Press F6 to load a third party driver" or something like that. Right before it gets to the option to see the hard drives, it will read your floppy and load the sata raid controller driver and your harddrive will be seen
     

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