Wipe Vista from Acer laptop and replace it with Win XP Home

JayCee

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I have the OEM version of MS Win XP Home which I bought a few years ago and used on my MacBook Pro laptop for about a year using Apple Bootcamp.
I then decided I no longer wanted to use Win XP and wiped the partition.
I have an Acer laptop which has Win Vista installed...I'd like to uninstall this completely and install Win XP Home on it instead.
Is this likely to be a simple process?, is it just a case of inserting the Win XP disc and it'll recognise this and ask if I want to install this other operating system and give me a choice of deleting the Vista installation?
Will I run into any licensing problems when Win XP asks for the product key i.e. will it "know" it's been installed before on a different computer?
Any help much appreciated.
 
From a legal point of view, it's tricky, as an OEM version of Windows is tied to the hardware it was 'supplied with'. However, you could argue that you have downgrade rights to move from Vista to XP on the Acer.

In practical terms, you would have to boot from the XP CD, format the partition where Vista is installed, and do a clean install of XP.

However, why would you want to do this? Vista is actually a very good OS. If you have a Vista DVD, a clean install on your Acer way work very nicely.
 
As Stiggy has already mentioned, being an OEM license you are not allowed to move it to another PC/laptop after it has been activated. The license is locked to the original hardware and even though it has been unistalled you can not install it on anything else.
Being able to downgrade from Vista to XP was a limited time offer from MS and is probably no longer an option they would offer - you could always try calling them to see where you stand though. But be aware that a clean install of XP would mean you loose all the software that is supplied with the laptop, such as CD/DVD burning tools, DVD playing software and all the other bloatware they stick on there that a few people may want to use. Unless you have the software install discs for it (not a recovery disc) you probably wont be able to reinstall it under XP. Some of the hardware, ie sound, graphics, LAN, wireless etc may not work as they don't have XP compatible drivers/software.

Mark.
 
As Stiggy has already mentioned, being an OEM license you are not allowed to move it to another PC/laptop after it has been activated. The license is locked to the original hardware and even though it has been unistalled you can not install it on anything else.

I may have given duff info here...the Win XP disc I have was bought retail...it did not come supplied with a PC.
 
Well if the version of XP came in a box with a manual etc then it should be a retail liicense and can therefore be installed on as many PC's ( but only 1 at a time) as you want. If it is a CD in just a sleeve then it is likely to be an OEM license and will be locked to the first computer it was installed on.

Mark.
 

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