Thinkpads Forum

I upgraded my xp pro to vista ultimate. And I do not like vista one bit. Is there any way to do so? please him. I need it for college. Some of the programs won't work on vista. Can I use the recovery disc?

upgrade is never a good decision.

Yes you can use your recovery discs to go back to a clean just bought machine. It will erase all of your data also.

snorlax360 wrote:I upgraded my xp pro to vista ultimate. And I do not like vista one bit. Is there any way to do so? please him. I need it for college. Some of the programs won't work on vista. Can I use the recovery disc?

Yes, as the other poster stated, you can use your recovery disks to go back to XP. Before doing that, copy your personal files and date over to an external USB drive so you do not lose them.

The recovery process back to factory spec is going to take over two and a half hours, so be prepared for a half day's work. Once re-installed, spend a few dollars on a imaging program to make a faithful copy of your installation that will only take 15 minutes or less to copy and restore should you need to do that later.

Using the recovery disks will return your ThinkPad to the exact state it was out of the box. That means all partitions and programs will be over written and put back to factory original spec. This is why you want to copy your files before the restore process.

sorry for asking such a retarded question, but once i put the 1st disc in, where do i go for me to install....i dont care about my previous stuff, i just want factory default..

To use your Product Recovery CDs, do the following:

Access IBM Help wrote:1. Insert your Rescue and Recovery disc into the CD or DVD drive.
2. Restart your computer.
3. After a short delay, the IBM(R) Rescue and Recovery(TM) workspace opens.
4. In the Rescue and Recovery menu, click Restore factory contents.
5. Follow the instructions on the screen.

What they fail to tell you is that after reboot (make sure there is no CD in the drive) you end up in the Rescue and Recovery workspace again. From there you have to again click on Restore factory contents (again). Now the restore begins from the files that were copied to your hard drive.

I am sure GomJabbar has covered everything but you can also have a look at these instructions.