Hey! Can anyone offer any information on the following:

Here's the deal: Bought all singing dancing powerful PC few months back, and asked that XP pro be installed as I disliked Vista so much.

My main hard drive froze and died last week, so I was planning to just buy a new one and re-install XP.

I've been told (by someone who WANTS to charge £50 for this) that it's not that simple and he would have to write some code to allow me to install XP as the motherboard wont be compatible as it would have been configured for Vista...

Is this true? If so, what is this code? Is it in the BIOS? Or am I being taken for a fool on this one?

Replies, etc., really appreciated, thanks  probably BS. there would be no "code" to write.

As an example, I recently bought a laptop- it came with vista. as an experiment I put XP, XP64, and Vista on it, in a triple-boot configuration.

XP installed and runs just fine. The only change I had to make was to set the SATA CONTROLLER to "compatible" so that the XP setup will see it as an IDE drive, meaning I didn't need SATA drivers.

If you're computer is anything like mine, or various other modern machines, chances are your paying 50 dollars for them to toggle a single setting in the BIOS, and install XP- both things you can do yourself for free.

Also, one can assume that they would need to find drivers for the machine as well- not an EASY task, but it's surely not "writing code" as they claim- rather it is a few google searches. As strange as it may sound, I was able to find and install drivers for everything in all OS's except the modem, which installed fine under XP32 and XP64 but not with Vista.

It really matters how much your TIME is worth. Sometimes doing it yourself can take hours- and sometimes you might even have to start over.Thanks for that - kinda confirms what I thought.

I'll have to read up a little on SATA & IDE's etc, and I should be on my way  Quote from: Rxprn on March 22, 2009, 09:06:04 AM

I've been told (by someone who wants to charge £50)

Taking the p*ss.