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could not be converted to XP (Does anyone know if this is a fact?).

I found a great deal Black Friday for a Dell 531. It was designed for Vista and only came in the vista flavors (home, pro, whatever). I took the standard home vista. It sucked.

So, I went thru the process of putting on XP on it anyway, and now have an Excellent machine. Here are the caveats:

Installing XP itself went generally okay, but left me without most drivers, like USB, network, sound card, video, etc, etc. The system still worked, albeit with no network, low screen res, USB 1.1, etc.

Forgeddabout gathering the drivers from DELL; they must have aggreements w/ MS that the machine is vista-only.

Browsing (and participating too) various user forums, found fantastic driver sources... so loaded drivers from the various manufacturers: motherboard chip set, video card, etc.

Other users have now gathered all the required drivers and put them in single packages for download. The bottom line: Everything works now with no "yellow-flag" hardware.

I found a great deal Black Friday for a Dell 531. It was designed for Vista and only came in the vista flavors (home, pro, whatever). I took the standard home vista. It sucked.

I just bought a Dell off their site with Vista as well. E521 - Anthlon 3800+ dual core with 1 GB ram and 250GB sata drive and other goodies. $300 but with no OS option other than Vista. I'm going to get an OEM version and reinstall XP. I plan to get all the drivers off the net for XP before I do anything with the new PC, though. Hopefully no issues, but for the price, I'll deal with the temporary inconvenience.

Did you first format the HDD then install XP? Or is the above because you installed XP on another partition? I don't understand why installing XP would come out only a partial install.

Forgeddabout gathering the drivers from DELL; they must have aggreements w/ MS that the machine is vista-only.

This is also likely for others (i.e. Best Buy) I'd assume.

Other users have now gathered all the required drivers and put them in single packages for download. The bottom line: Everything works now with no "yellow-flag" hardware.

So, you're saying, XP can only be installed 'partially' on a former Vista machine, but the balance (drivers, etc.) can be obtained from sources online. Is this correct? What are those sources?