[slt_14]

hey guys,

I have the following problem:
I am on a laptop that uses windows vista as operating system.
This operating system was already installed along with some other programs.
My computer has become very slow and gives all these system failures etc.
I have my data all backed up, so I wanted to reinstall the operating system,
but the windows vista installation disk was not included when I bought this laptop.

So I thought lets get rid of windows vista and install windows xp which I prefer anyway.
So I changed the booting priority threw in my windows xp cd,
but got an error when I tried to install windows xp,
because windows vista was preinstalled so I couldn't undo the installation of windows vista.

So my questions:

How do I get rid of the preinstalled version of windows vista, and be able again to install my windows xp ?
or if thats impossible: How do i reinstall windows vista without a disk ?

(I haven't made any recovery points to which i can rollback the computer )

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Hi ,

Before decide to go with Windows XP you should take in consideration that XP is an old system and that next year Microsoft will end the support to this OS making the upgrade almost inevitable.

Most laptops have a Recovery Partition hidden on the Hard Disk and this make it possible to reinstall the system to a state like when you started the machine for the first time.

Please provide the Brand and Model of the laptop so we can search for specific instruction about how to restore the machine to factory state.

[SleepyDude]

Hi ,

Before decide to go with Windows XP you should take in consideration that XP is an old system and that next year Microsoft will end the support to this OS making the upgrade almost inevitable.

Most laptops have a Recovery Partition hidden on the Hard Disk and this make it possible to reinstall the system to a state like when you started the machine for the first time.

Please provide the Brand and Model of the laptop so we can search for specific instruction about how to restore the machine to factory state.

[slt_14]

The laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad T61
Operational system Microsoft Windows Vista Professional
OS Service Pack Service Pack 2
Hard drive HITACHI HTS541680J9SA00
Processor Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU T7100 @ 1.80GHz

Edited by slt_14, 13 September 2013 - 03:03 PM.

[SleepyDude]

Hi,

To restore Windows Vista to the Factory Defaults try pressing the F11 key during boot to access Rescue and Recovery

If you want to try XP I would recommend first to create the Recovery Disks, with those disks you can always restore the machine to factory defaults with Windows Vista and all the other stuff in case you delete everything from the Hard Disk Drive or in case of an HDD failure.

Under ThinkVantage folder in Windows Start / All Programs you will find an app called Create Recovery Media. Open it and create the recovery disc set. You will need 1 CD for the first disc and DVD's or CD's discs for the rest (better use DVD's because of more capacity).