{"id":59,"date":"2008-04-09T00:01:07","date_gmt":"2008-04-09T07:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=59"},"modified":"2008-04-08T20:41:27","modified_gmt":"2008-04-09T03:41:27","slug":"windows-vista-downgrade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=59","title":{"rendered":"Windows Vista Downgrade"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently downgraded my Windows Vista test machine back to Windows XP. Because I know this interests folks, I thought I&#8217;d explain <em>How I Did It<\/em>.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nThe Vista-to-XP downgrade is not something I did because I loathe Vista. My Vista test machine, Valentine, was flakey. It was flakey because it was an <em>upgrade<\/em>. In all my books, I recommend against upgrading your PC with a newer version of Windows. In this case, I had to upgrade because I was working on a book (<em>Find Gold in Windows Vista<\/em>) and needed a machine with Vista. The problems I had with the Vista Beta never went away.<\/p>\n<p>To accomplish the downgrade I cheated. You can cheat as well. Here&#8217;s what you need:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A Windows XP installation disc<\/li>\n<li>The Windows XP product key<\/li>\n<li>A spare hard drive<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I happen to have a few XP installation discs just lying about. The discs are from my previous attempts to build my own PC. So they&#8217;re the real deal; I do not pirate software.<\/p>\n<p>Along with the discs came their product keys, required to complete installation. With Valentine, the product key was also on his case. (Incidentally, I also have an XP product key on a few PC cases out in the boneyard, so product keys aren&#8217;t an issue for me; if you do this downgrade, however, you will need a valid XP product key.)<\/p>\n<p>The spare hard drive is the ingenious part, and the key to making this a smooth downgrade. I had a spare SATA drive (150GB) that I pulled from my Macintosh months ago. So I installed that drive into Valentine. It was a simple operation; there was plenty of room and I had a spare SATA cable.<\/p>\n<p>After closing up Valentine&#8217;s console, I stuck the Windows XP disc into the optical drive. Turning on the PC greeted me with a <code>Press any key to boot CD<\/code> prompt. I pressed Enter and the XP Setup program began.<\/p>\n<p>During the XP Setup process, you&#8217;re asked to choose a hard drive on which to install the operating system. I choose the newly installed drive, reformatted it (which took forever), and then installed XP on that drive. After installation, the drive booted up and I had XP on my computer.<\/p>\n<p>Additional modification was necessary; I keep all my PC&#8217;s original, factory discs. So I was able to re-install and configure the motherboard and video adapter. Further, I downloaded the SP 2 update (my XP installation disc is <em>old<\/em>) and many, many additional security updates.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Weird thing.<\/strong> The drive I installed showed up as drive F. No problem. But that still means that the computer uses <code>F:<\/code> as the primary hard drive. <code>C:<\/code> is the old Vista drive. So when I updated my user folder, I had to copy files from <code>C:<\/code> to <code>F:<\/code>. No biggie, but weird \u2014 and fixable: Using the Administrative Tools, Computer Management\/Disk Management console you can easily re-assign hard drive letters. Still, I think it&#8217;s funky to have a drive F as the boot drive, so I might just keep it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently downgraded my Windows Vista test machine back to Windows XP. Because I know this interests folks, I thought I&#8217;d explain How I Did It.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}