[Delaine]

I have recently bought a Toshiba satellite A300
Model No.PSAGCA-06M01N and would like to
replace the Vista operating system with Windows XP.
Anyone able to help or is this locked out?
Jean

[Carbon]

You format the hard drive and install XP, but I'd be curious to hear what problems you have with Vista that you need to downgrade to XP for. The only scenario in which I wouldn't keep Vista on a new system is if you're running a netbook, and the PSAGCA-06M01N is definitely not a netbook (high-end CPu, dedicated graphics).

[Delaine]

Thanks Carbon. I ran Autocad on my last laptop which was also a Toshiba but it died of some screen display failure. Have always run ACAD on XP and heard bad comments about Vista being too slow and crashes? Maybe this is just bad press?

[Razer]

Vista "used" to be the doom and gloom of today's PC's. While it's nothing to write home about now, it's much more stable and still an upgrade from XP.

If you're thinking of upgrading, use Windows 7. If not, stick with Vista. No need for XP anymore besides cheap computing..

[Carbon]

There's a lot of crap thrown around about Vista, as Razer noted - its launch was not very good, but it can't seem to shake that initial impression even though now it's a better OS than XP in nearly every way.

But AutoCAD isn't a normal consumer sort of application, and it's perfectly plausible it might not run as well under Vista. If you haven't given it a shot under Vista I would do that, and if it doesn't run to your liking XP may be the way to go. It's likely that if there's a compatibility issue under Vista it will have one under 7, but if there's not and you were going to buy a copy of XP, I'd buy a copy of 7 instead. It really is a great OS.