Hi guys...

My young bloke has had an Asus Laptop F3J that came with Vista Home Premium and a recovery Disc for about 18 months.

It's been a real PITA and I've left it alone up till now.

I have been trying to fix a windows installer problem in that it keeps coming up every time you want to open a program eg.. word , publisher, powerpoint etc. It keeps wanting to install the program even though its already installed.

I have failed miserably to fix it sooooo....Apart from running the recovery disc and getting a clean install... I'm thinking of putting XP Pro on it..

Can you think of any problems ?? eg.. I'm thinking about the BIOS on the mobo that's been set up for Vista.. will it be okay for XP ?

Any suggestions appreciated....

i'm sure you'll just need the xp drivers for the mobo/graphics etc

check the asus site for them & others before you do anything

http://support.asus.com/faq/faq.aspx


why not just reinstall vista again?

Thanks bj..

Yea, thinking that if it's all toooo hard I'lll just use the vista recovery disc again..

It's just that since he's had it theres been nothing but complaints so seeing this is the first time that we've come to this stage with all the problems, I thought I'd try XP PRO !!

Thanks guys,, I have now found a thread from last year that covers this topic.

Looks like I'll be reinstalling the Vista. bugga..!!

Good choice on the Vista!

I've just installed XP Pro over Vista on a Toshiba laptop (Satellite Pro L40) and the only problem was that XP Pro doesn't come with Serial ATA drivers and you can only install them via a floppy drive don't own one, don't want one!

Googling seems to suggest that your Asus has a Serial ATA drive, so you will have the same problem. I managed a workaround by creating an unattended install disk with nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/) and including the Serial ATA drivers in the build. I've played around with manually creating unattended install disks for XP before, but this takes a fair bit of fiddling around and nLite seems to do a great job.

Also ckeck out http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/1/ if you're interested in unattended installs; has saved me many weekends.

My experience with Vista so far, is that like so many upgrades in the past, MS have moved things around just enough so that I can't find what I'm looking for, or fix any problems that I have. Stick wih XP Pro; SP2 seems fairly stable (for an MS OS anyway!) and I believe SP3 should be with us soon.

Sláinte

midders

Thanks Midders

I'm not that clued up with sort of things you suggested, but I've re installed the vista.. given the machine back to him... till the next time lol...