going back xp

I put Vista in last night over XP and have been unimpressed with how slow and ungainly it is. I know Microsoft still has lots of performance tweaks to put in and all but I'm not willing to blow so much of my time on this right now.
so I want windows XP back.
Problem is, that windows Somehow seems to have taken over the space between Bios and O.S. load, because even though I've gone into the bios and changed ALL of my start up drives to CD Rom and have my XP (and 98) CDs in the drives, Windows continues to boot.
I have three HDs, a SATA2 which Windows is on as my primary and two IDEs. any suggestions for how I'd go about getting Windows XP back if I can't boot to a CD?

Sorry - if you've got Vista on your partition/drive - you'll have to boot the XP setup up as that's the only way to do it :o(
-- Zack Whittaker » ZackNET Enterprises: www.zacknet.co.uk » MSBlog on ResDev: www.msblog.org » Vista Knowledge Base: www.vistabase.co.uk » This mailing is provided "as is" with no warranties, and confers no rights. All opinions expressed are those of myself unless stated so, and not of my employer, best friend, Ghandi, my mother or my cat. Glad we cleared that up!
--: Original message follows :-- "Angyl" wrote in message

I put Vista in last night over XP and have been unimpressed with how slow and ungainly it is. I know Microsoft still has lots of performance tweaks to put in and all but I'm not willing to blow so much of my time on this right now.
so I want windows XP back.
Problem is, that windows Somehow seems to have taken over the space between Bios and O.S. load, because even though I've gone into the bios and changed ALL of my start up drives to CD Rom and have my XP (and 98) CDs in the drives, Windows continues to boot.
I have three HDs, a SATA2 which Windows is on as my primary and two IDEs. any suggestions for how I'd go about getting Windows XP back if I can't boot to a CD?

Yes, if you installed Vista on the same drive (or performed an upgrade) then you'll have to do a clean install of XP. You'll WANT to do a clean install of XP or you may get some really weird issues or simply have a lot of random files here, there and everywhere.
If you had it setup as a dual boot then you'll need to reload the XP boot loader to go back to the way things were... sorta.
I'm sure that folks get themselves in these predicaments due to not having spare hardware or hard drives to do clean installs but honestly that's the best and safest way to work with beta's given they are still rather young and can make a mess of things. I've made the same mistake in the past and unfortunately had to learn the hard way. =(
I hope that things work out for you, sorry you had the trouble.
"Zack Whittaker" wrote in message

Sorry - if you've got Vista on your partition/drive - you'll have to boot the XP setup up as that's the only way to do it :o(
-- Zack Whittaker » ZackNET Enterprises: www.zacknet.co.uk » MSBlog on ResDev: www.msblog.org » Vista Knowledge Base: www.vistabase.co.uk » This mailing is provided "as is" with no warranties, and confers no rights. All opinions expressed are those of myself unless stated so, and not of my employer, best friend, Ghandi, my mother or my cat. Glad we cleared that up!
--: Original message follows :-- "Angyl" wrote in message I put Vista in last night over XP and have been unimpressed with how slow and ungainly it is. I know Microsoft still has lots of performance tweaks to put in and all but I'm not willing to blow so much of my time on this right now.
so I want windows XP back.
Problem is, that windows Somehow seems to have taken over the space between Bios and O.S. load, because even though I've gone into the bios and changed ALL of my start up drives to CD Rom and have my XP (and 98) CDs in the drives, Windows continues to boot.
I have three HDs, a SATA2 which Windows is on as my primary and two IDEs. any suggestions for how I'd go about getting Windows XP back if I can't boot to a CD?

Hopefully someone can tell you a better way, but here is brute force method. if you really want to get rid of vista and reinstall xp,you try boot in vista - delete the boot mgr, delete - place in XP CD cold start it that does not work and you don't have any data in the vista partition, use a disk utility to destroy the vista partition - delete
Good luck

BTW vista is good only for recent PC with high powered GPU acceleration video card. their suggested minimum machine is a bit lacking except for the vary basic home edition. I guess if the PC plays advanced Doom well, it BE should ok with Vista
"Angyl" wrote in message

I put Vista in last night over XP and have been unimpressed with how slow and ungainly it is. I know Microsoft still has lots of performance tweaks to put in and all but I'm not willing to blow so much of my time on this right now.
so I want windows XP back.
Problem is, that windows Somehow seems to have taken over the space between Bios and O.S. load, because even though I've gone into the bios and changed ALL of my start up drives to CD Rom and have my XP (and 98) CDs in the drives, Windows continues to boot.
I have three HDs, a SATA2 which Windows is on as my primary and two IDEs. any suggestions for how I'd go about getting Windows XP back if I can't boot to a CD?

Thanks for your help, that did the trick.
I don't believe it was my machine's specs that gave me issues with Vista, I just don't think Microsoft has yet implemented the performance/speed tweaks into this Beta yet and I don't have the patience to find bugs slooooooooooooooowly...
My system is a P4 2.8 GHz Dual Core, 800Front/Side 1 gig RAM 5200 Gigabyte/Nvidia GeForce 7600GT video card SATA 2 120Gig hard drive with 60 gigs free
If Vista WAS tweaked to have all it's speed and couldn't play fast with my system (even with Aero and indexing off), I betcha there's gonna be a PHENOMENAL outcry from the public when it's released next year...
"gs" wrote:

Hopefully someone can tell you a better way, but here is brute force method. if you really want to get rid of vista and reinstall xp,you try boot in vista - delete the boot mgr, delete - place in XP CD cold start it that does not work and you don't have any data in the vista partition, use a disk utility to destroy the vista partition - delete
Good luck

BTW vista is good only for recent PC with high powered GPU acceleration video card. their suggested minimum machine is a bit lacking except for the vary basic home edition. I guess if the PC plays advanced Doom well, it BE should ok with Vista
"Angyl" wrote in message I put Vista in last night over XP and have been unimpressed with how slow and ungainly it is. I know Microsoft still has lots of performance tweaks to put in and all but I'm not willing to blow so much of my time on this right now.
so I want windows XP back.
Problem is, that windows Somehow seems to have taken over the space between Bios and O.S. load, because even though I've gone into the bios and changed ALL of my start up drives to CD Rom and have my XP (and 98) CDs in the drives, Windows continues to boot.
I have three HDs, a SATA2 which Windows is on as my primary and two IDEs. any suggestions for how I'd go about getting Windows XP back if I can't boot to a CD?