I was asked to downgrade another laptop from Vista to XP.

I’ve done a few so far, so once I made sure it had Vista Business and some XP downgrade disks, I figured: this should be simple enough.

The supplied Disks are a bit odd: 2 XP disks, plus a “System disk”.

Oh well, ignore that for now.

I boot Vista, run acers “recovery” system, and create 2 recovery DVDs for Vista.

I see there is also the option to create a driver backup disk, so I make one of those too.

Then I put the first XP disk in the drive and restart the PC.

I expect the XP disk to boot, and give me the option to wipe out Vista and install XP… but Vista boots (from the hard drive) instead…

Hmmm: an XP downgrade disks that won’t boot… maybe the boot order is wrong (boot from HDD before the DVD drive… I check, but it is set to boot the DVD drive first…

Are the XP disks faulty somehow? I can copy the whole contents without a problem… but neither look like bootable disks… whats going on here?

I eventually realise what Acer have done. Rather that save themselves a few cents by not shipping any disks, they decided to ship an extra disk (now thats totally unexpected… I’m sure the accountants don’t know this is happening!), and make the whole process more complicated…

This is what needs to happen:

• you boot from the recovery partition, or from the “system” disk first.
• You say you want to recover the system back to factory defaults (you assume they mean Vista, don’t you?)
• You get asked to insert the OS disk
• So you put the XP OS disk in the drive (you could insert the newly-created Vista recovery disks instead)
• The Acer recovery software knows how to unpack the disk and puts XP (or Vista) onto the hard drive.

So there you go… regardless of installing XP or Vista, you need to boot the system disk first.

I’m sure this system was either created by a committee, or by someone who doesn’t deal with real customers every day.