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    Downgrading to XP on the T400

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by whittems, Oct 14, 2008.

  1. whittems

    whittems Notebook Enthusiast

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    I just got my T400 yesterday and am already regretting not purchasing the Vista Business downgrade to Windows XP Professional option. Admittedly this is my first experience with Vista and I expect there to be an adjustment. But at this point I'm ready to go back to XP and not even think twice. How would I get XP at this point since I passed on having Lenovo install it for me? Also, does anyone know how long Windows intends to keep supporting XP?
     
  2. 000111

    000111 Atari Master

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    as far as i know, you have downgrade rights with vista business and professional no matter if you bought the recovery cd or not. find an xp cd, install, and call microsoft to figure out activation for the 'downgrade.' if you bought vista home, however, you are out of luck unless you want to pay for a copy of xp. i suggest you back up your current configuration in case you run into problems.
     
  3. StealthTH

    StealthTH Notebook Evangelist

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    Just curious, what kind of problems are you having with Vista? Unless you equipped your T400 with 1gb of memory, Vista is really fast.
     
  4. Potstickr

    Potstickr Notebook Guru

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    I have to concur...when our T400 arrived, the first thing i did was wipe the drive clean and install XP...I assumed XP with RMclock would produce the most stable, power efficient setup...still, I was curious what Vista Business (x86) could bring to the table...so I dual-booted both OSes and recently removed XP completely...

    Vista really surprised me...I delayed the "upgrade" to Vista based on initial reviews, but read SP1 really helped improve the file copy issues and toned down the UAc (you can still turn it off if preferred)...

    ...anyways, Vista boots 5 seconds slower than my previous XP setup (42 sec vs 37 sec) but Vista with RMclock (yes, it works) is able to run almost a full hour longer than my best XP optimizations...i resisted Vista out of fear it would hog resources and chew away battery life by thrashing the hdd, but that hasn't been the case at all...trust me, no one is more pleasantly surprised than i am...

    runing P8400, 2GB RAM, 250 GB-5400 RPM, LED backlight, Thinkpad abg, 6-cell battery.
     
  5. plancy

    plancy Notebook Evangelist

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    aww, i was hoping XP would be more battery efficient...
     
  6. Potstickr

    Potstickr Notebook Guru

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    for the record, gaming is noticeably slower on Vista, regardless if I run it in compatibility mode or try to set processor affinity...will try and experiment with running XP within a virtual environment...but if battery life is the priority, Vista has worked out better than XP for me...
     
  7. plancy

    plancy Notebook Evangelist

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    ugh i should have got a bigger harddrive.. is there a way for two partitions with Vista and XP, so i can run XP for gaming and Vista for battery life
     
  8. Potstickr

    Potstickr Notebook Guru

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    i used an old copy of partition magic 8 (not Vista compatible), but you could probably use Paragon's Partition Manager 9 (XP & Vista compatible) found here or here too for creating partitions.

    dual-booting is a fairly simple matter with a lot guides and tutorials online, but the thing is, it's important which OS you install first, if you decide to remove one later...typically, it is standard practice to install the oldest OS first, so in this case, you'd install XP, then Vista...but when I decided to remove XP, I encountered problems cloning the boot sector and mbr to the vista partition...since XP was installed first, when Vista installs, its bootloader is installed on the XP partition, so removing the XP partition made it impossible to boot Vista afterwards...I couldn't find a work around for this...suggestions to use EasyBCD didn't work so I eventually had to wipe the entire hdd clean and start all over with Vista only...

    maybe you can try using Virtual PC 2007, free download from microsoft here, and run XP as a virtual machine for gaming...i only play sim city 4, which still runs fine on Vista, just not as smooth as when on XP...hope this will help you with your dual-boot efforts!

    EDIT: Totally forgot to mention Vista's built-in partition manager, like redbeardthepirate stated below...definitely an option if you decide to install Vista first...although not even Vista's partition manager could help when I tried to remove XP (first OS installed) since it couldn't delete the primary partition.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 2, 2015
  9. redbeardthepirate

    redbeardthepirate Notebook Enthusiast

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    I've gotten better gaming performance in Vista than XP myself... but if you really want to dual boot, just use Vista's built in disk management software. Hit the Windows key, type in Computer Management, hit enter, go to Disk Management, right click on the partition with Vista on it, and hit Shrink Volume. Shrink by the size you want your XP partition to be, then create a partition for XP, and install XP on it.
     
  10. LGt400

    LGt400 Notebook Geek

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    I hate XP's Power Manager, maybe it's lack of update is part of the reason, why it's such a battery hog.
     
  11. whittems

    whittems Notebook Enthusiast

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    Well I'm not exactly sure what's going on with it. It's possible that I'm just really impatient, but it seems like its quite a bit slower than XP was on my old Dell Inspiron 8600. I'm running the P8600 with 4GBs of ram so I was expecting Vista to be quite fast and it definitely feels slower and feels like I spend much more time waiting for things to load. Still I'm not sure if I expected it to be lightning quick and now that it's not I'm just being a whiner. How would I go about benchmarking it to get some objective numbers on how it's running?
     
  12. whittems

    whittems Notebook Enthusiast

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    Since I didn't mention it before. I'm running Vista Home Basic, so presumably there's no support for a downgrade. I'm strongly regretting my decision to not just pay the extra money to get Vista Business and the XP downgrade. Is there anyway to get this after the fact. Can I send it back to Lenovo and have them install Vista Business with the downgrade and just pay for that? Or, assuming I do want the downgrade, would I just be stuck buying a copy of XP and installing it on my own?