I have noticed some great deals on laptops lately, but wonder if I can convert them back to Windows XP when I get it. I do not want to run vista.

Can this be done?

in most cases yes you can.

check the drivers that the laptop has. I have seen one or two that the video card only supported a vista driver. I would look at the laptop you are considering, figure out what chipset and drivers it has video, ethernet sound and look for drivers that support xp. check the manuf website of the laptop first and if that doesnt pan out look directly to the vendor of the componet. (ati, siig, nvidia, etc)

Nothing wrong with vista... and you'll get a free upgrade to Windows 7.... which should be even better.

XP is running short on its update life cycle.

Big D

vista is a resource hog though. I have a Dell laptop with vista, its a core 2 duo 2.2 ghz with 4 gigs of mem and my pool old Athlon xp 2800 with 2 gigs of mem keeps up with it. I ended up selling the dell laptop after having it for 5 weeks and went back to my old gateway p4 2.8 laptop with 2 gigs and xp because, well it is just as fast as well.

Vista did have a few kool features, but nothing that made me want to change to it.

back in the day, operating system upgrades brought new technologys with them.

win3.1 3.1 for workgroups well GUI. - before that I was writing .BAT files to execute Lotus 2.01 and word 4.0 (i think 4) the ol blue screens with keyboard commands

win95 - came out in 96 and this gave us the ability to shotgun 2 modems, which I did. (the poor mans isdn)

win98 came out and gave us the ability to run dual monitors. I used my matrox millenium g400 with a tv tuner and had dual screens

win 2000 came out and gave us IIS and you could host a website also some other features like software raid (on the server version)

winxp came out and had some new wrappers and was a bit more functional, did bring with it remote desktop although we can do that with other OS's with programs like VNC.

Vista - doesn't bring much to the table in my book. Like trying to stuff a size 20 ass in size 8 jeans.

my two cents nehow

Chas,
Some of Dell's laptops are still available with XP and they come with a free upgrade to Vista.

I will say XP, Vista and Windows 7 offers 64 bit which at first wasn't reality due to lack of drivers for old hardware. We are about past that point now most hardware and software will support 64 bit, this opens the door for lots more memory

I just bought a used computer for my daughter from a IS guy that was running windows 7 on it that he called release version and its great, my son who is a Apple guys said it was close to how the Apple work and he would take use a computer with Windows 7 on it. We have till next August then the will have to buy this version or install the xp that came on it.

Like others said, it basically comes down to the drivers available. Yes you can load XP on it if you can find the drivers for most of the hardware. I did this on my HP laptop and has been running great.

I've been using Windows 7 since the testing version was released, and so far I like it. I would hold out to get a laptop with Windows 7 already loaded on it. I would not want one with vista and Windows 7 upgrade on top of it. For stability reasons I prefer not to stack operating systems.