Do you see yourself as pretty knowledgable with computers?

Question

If so, can you answer this question?

I just bought a laptop which came with vista, office 2007 and other great programs like adobe, cyberlink & nero.

Now the problem is, that i want to downgrade to XP [Vista gives me the irrates] but to do this i would need to reformat.

This dosetn bother me, but i would loose all of these programs that i really want to keep.

I need the setup installer files. Ive searched all over and can only find the installer for Adobe.

My question is, how would i go about keeping these programs when i reformat. [Re downloading copies off the internet is out of the question unfortunatley, as broadband is not avaliable in my area and i'm still on dial up.

Answer 1

I'd say if you have a friend who has broadband, go to his place & download the programs, burn it on a disc or USB drive & you are good to go. Also check the CD's that you got with the Laptop Sometimes they do have folders for add-on's that are autorun after setup... Make sure that you have a Vista Backup/Restore disk  before you format. Vista is not popular now, but I remember that people said the same thing about XP when it came.

If you don't have the friend you can go to, the other option is buy the CD's.

If you don't want to buy, ask your friends in other states to D/L & burn & ship the DVD to you.

Best of Luck mate !!

Answer 2

get a friend to download them for you and send you them on dvd's

Answer 3

The short answer is that you cannot.  If you don't have the install CDs for the programs on the machine there is no way to downgrade to XP and keep the programs.

If you have the setup CDs that came with the laptop, you may be able to reinstall any apps once you've reinstalled the OS.  Some systems come with a utility that will let you make setup CDs instead of shipping them with the PC, possibly even the XP setup CD, so poke around the Start Menu looking for that.

Answer 4

Very often with new computers you do not get disks with them, but if you have CD writer or DVD writer the data is on the hard drive and a program to write utility and recovery CD's or DVD's.  So you should create those CD's or DVD's before making any major changes, so if that does not work out, you can at least put it back the way it was.

But why not learn the new system, so you will be knowledgeable when others get stumped?  That is why I got Office 2007 for my laptop, to answer questions from a clueless friend about it.  I only have experience with 1 Vista machine at work, but figured out how to resolve some initial issues for that user and everything is working fine.