[dalereed]

having to use cox for e-mail stinks, I can’t use my color laser printer, it wonpt accept it or it’s drivers, for starters.

What do i have to do, buy a new harddrive?

[Jonty30]

Do you have a Windows XP boot disk?

If so, and doublecheck before doing anything, you should only have to format the C: and load the boot disk.

[SWAMPSNIPER]

Try Thunderbird for your mail, it works OK. Really easy set up.

[Kirkwood]

Color printers are cheap - you would have been better off upgrading the printer than downgrading your OS. You will soon regret what you are doing.

[Myrddin]

Is it a 64-bit Windows 7? If so, you can get VMware player loaded on your machine, then create a virtual machine to host the Windows XP. You can also make a VM with a Linux distro. Boot them when you want them, leave them virtually "power off" when you don't need them. No need to toss the Win 7.

My new company laptop has an i7-2600 with 8 GB RAM and 500 GB of disk. The OS is Win 7 64-bit Enterprise Edition. The company IT people could not get it configured with dual boot due to whole disk encryption (Symantec) demanded by company security policy. The free VMware player solved the problem by giving the VM capability. You can load up a VM using disk media (CDROM/DVD) or simply an ISO download image file. It's dirt simple. If you don't like it, you can remove it. You might also find Virtual Box to your liking. Similar concept, but supplied as open source and supported by Oracle.

I have 3 VMs built on my laptop. Fedora 16 32-bit, Fedora 16 64-bit and Debian 6 64-bit. All work fine. Just like having a physical host.