[Elvandil]

Originally Posted by JamesRandom

I had the CD for XP professional on a machine that was running XP home, but at the time the CD/DVD drives were giving me alot of grief, so i used its one last good burn to rip the contents of the XPpro installation CD and then made an image which i stored on a second harddrive.
Then, once I had done that, all I had to do was click the setup.exe for XPpro and it began removing XPhome and installing XPpro automatically.
What you say about formatting first makes sense. But I couldn't see any reason why XP wouldn't just try to remove the current operating system no matter what compatibility it had before it installed itself.

Sounds like it went smoothly before, but how did you make the image?

[JamesRandom]

Originally Posted by katabby

Berfore getting rid of Vista, why don't you give it a spin around the dance floor.

It's for the simple fact the laptop comes with Vista Home Premium, which means, as a graphic designer, I wont be able to install such programs as Photoshop. Otherwise i probably would give it a spin. Also for the fact that I know places where I can get most of the "nifty" perks of Vista for XP, if you Dig deep enough."

As regards the image. I just used Alcohol 120% to create a CD image from the extracted files.
Yes it went smoothly before, drivers detected and found OK. But a Vista machine is different, I expect.

[tomdkat]

Originally Posted by JamesRandom

It's for the simple fact the laptop comes with Vista Home Premium, which means, as a graphic designer, I wont be able to install such programs as Photoshop. Otherwise i probably would give it a spin.

Why do you say this? I helped someone install PS on a Vista Home Basic machine and it worked fine. Why wouldn't Home Premium support it? We did have a problem with a PS plugin and the plugin developer recommended disabling the UAC. Other than that, PS worked just fine.

Peace...

[JamesRandom]

Hmm, ill that that into account and give it some consideration. I WOULD like to have a look around Vista to see what all the fuss is about, so i might take your advice.

[tomdkat]

Nik Color Efex Pro 2.0 is the plugin we had problems with (it just wouldn't load) but PS itself ran fine.

Peace...

[JamesRandom]

Ah, but was this Photoshop CS3? When I tried to install CS3 on XPhome for someone, it wouldnt install, complaining that I had the person had to have Service Pack 2.

[tomdkat]

Nope, it was PS CS2. XP Home Edition not having SP2 (service pack 2) installed isn't any unusual or hard to deal with. SP2 adds a bunch of security enhancements and other things to XP. Simply installing SP2 (which they should have done a LONG time ago) is all they needed to do. Vista won't have that kind of issue.

Here are the system requirements for PS CS3. We got PS CS2 running on Vista Home Basic (at least I think it's basic) just fine, with the exception of the plugin issue I mentioned above.

If you have Vista on a machine and PS CS3 on a CD, do the installation and see for yourself.

Peace...

[JamesRandom]

I am a bit puzzled by all this.
XP should not need SATA drivers with the Intel 945 + ICH7. The BIOS should see the SATA drive as native and allow installation as an IDE drive would. The extra drivers would only be required for a RAID setup in a desktop?