E6500 clean install question

I have an E6500 with vista on it, however, some programs that I need to use for school do not, ahh, re act well to vista. So I want to turn this into a XP machine. I contacted dell and they gave the list of drivers I would need. What do I need to do to install xp and remove vista?

 

Backup and data you want to e.g. a USB hard drive or second partition

Obtain an XP CD (preferably a Dell OEM one, or hunt down their CD key via a search engine either will save you from having to go through manual activation)

Slipstream SP3 into it, if you don't have access to a floppy drive, also slipstream the iastor.sys textmode driver into it (nLite is useful here)

Install from the CD and flatten existing partitions

I then installed in the following order

disabled TPM in BIOS

Dell System software
Intel (not Dell) chipset drivers
Intel (not Dell) Video drivers (you may have nVidia)
Ricoh R5C8xx driver (A03 from Dell)
IDT audio driver (A06 from Dell)
Gigabit driver (from intel)
WiFi 5300 driver (from intel)
Bluetooth driver (from dell)
5530 WWAN driver from Dell
Sony Ericson Wireless Manager (from dell for Mini9)
Connexant modem driver (from dell)
DCP System Manager
DCP Security Drivers
Reboot and enable TPM in BIOS
DCP Security App (Wave from Dell)

I did not install the Intel Matrix Manager App, or ALPS touchpad drivers, or DCP Connection Manager, or Webcam driver.

Then allow Windows update to install latest Gigabit and Webcam drivers, all hotfixes and dotnet runtimes.

restore data files

 

Ahhh...one of the many complaints with regard to Vista; compatibility. In spite of this, Vista SP1 really isn't all that bad (Windows 7 is much better, though). A viable option for your situation (provided you have at least 2GB of RAM and a copy of XP handy) would be to use Microsoft's Virtual PC application (a free download). You could install WinXP on the virtual machine and run it in a window right on your Vista desktop. This works great. I have an old Novell 3.12 server that Vista won't even see due to the fact Microsoft removed support for IPX networks. This becomes a non-issue when I have XP running in a window.

 

What are the programs you had problems with?