I bought a new machine with Vista on it. I gave Vista a try, understanding how large Vista as a OS was, I even went so far as upgrading the hardware to run Vista's large size to give Vista a fair chance to impress me. It wasn't horrible but I did run into only one unfixable problem that makes running Vista impossble in my current situation. In the house we have 4 other computers runnning xp and after many long frustrating hours, it's become obvious that vista doesn't want to network with xp.
So I decide to add xp to the machine to fix this problem. I partitioned the drives, following all the tutorials out there to set up a dual boot machine and everything seemed to be working fine. I now have noticed xp is running slow, vista even slower. Whenever I boot into Vista and try to shut down my machine, theres an error message, something about a memory dump or something of the sort, and the machine freezes up for 10 minutes. Another problem, Vista's partition is 154.05GB, 134.89GB being free space, while xp is only 71.76gb. And my machine won't let me shrink the vista partition any smaller. I want that space back.
I decided Vista is being to much of a hassle, so I want to uninstall Vista so I can get my machine running smoothly. I don't have a Vista dvd, so all the tutorials I have found to uninstall vista so far are worthless.
I figure formatting the drive vista on is my safest bet. Since I can't uninstall vista, I don't have the dvd and I won't be able to get a hold of the dvd. Is there anything I need to watch for when formatting away vista? Before I format what about all my drivers? I still don't think I have them all downloaded. Once i;ve formatted vista away what will happen to the recovery partition, will I be able to merge all the partitions together? How would I go about doing this? I do have my old xp disc that I used to intall xp on this machine but I don't have any recovery discs. Suggestions? Options? Help?