Can I try out the Vista before they reinstall XP w/o consequence (stupid question?)

Hi. I sent my thinkpad for some repair. It's repaired, but during repair they reinstalled the OS. I had XP (downgraded from Vista), but they (wrongly) installed Vista. Have called and will send back to get XP reinstalled. For now I have the machine on Vista. I haven't set it up yet, am on the screen with License terms (haven't clicked on "I agree" blah blah). My question is, if I go ahead to set up the Vista (am curious to see what Vista is like), is there any undesirable consequence? In other words, once I have used the Vista on this machine, and later the tech support reinstalled XP, will I still have the license right to use the Vista in future?

Thanks for bearing with me if my question sounds stupid

 

Yes, you can play with it, and no, you won't locked in to Vista by doing so. The license allows you to run one or the other, your choice.

 

Thanks for the quick answer

 

You can try it out without issue. Although, I'd probably ask for them to send you XP recovery discs rather than shipping your machine to them and having them change the OS. That way you can choose which one you want on your own.

You should also try and make a set of Vista recovery discs (assuming you don't have one already).

 

Thanks for the suggestions. I have never installed an OS myself and am worried if I can't succeed in the installation. How long does it take usually? If I get both discs, can I switch back and forth (though that would be crazy )?

P.S.: My HDD is supposed to be 160GB, but it shows capacity is only 126GB, with 15GB used and 111GB available. 126 is too far from 160 isn't it?

 

The recovery discs aren't really an OS install. It simply restores your machine to factory status by following a fairly straightforward wizard. It will probably take an hour or two as the contents of the DVDs must first be copied to a recovery partition on the HDD and then your system is rebuilt from there.

Your 160GB HDD is really 149.02GB (Decimal→Binary conversion). The 23GB discrepancy you are noticing after that is almost certainly due to the recovery partition (stores an image of Vista and allows restoring to factory). You can delete this after making recovery discs (look in Start→ThinkVantage).

 

you can burn the recovery discs from Vista by going into Start -> Program -> Thinkvantage -> Create Recovery media -> Click Recovery discs. Should burn 3 discs set (rescue and recovery start up discs, OS recovery discs, drivers discs).

 

Thank you very much. I guess if XP is installed it will take less storage?
I created the recovery discs--yes, 3 DVD discs (even though in the beginning it says the first disc is not available for DVD).

 

xp will probably be slightly faster