How to downgrade from Vista to XP?

[dinglydoo]

Hello,

I have had my Thinkpad T61 since late August and I can't say that I am fully happy with the performance of my machine. I occasionally get lock ups and such, and after searching through these forums I found a fix for it, but just recently after installing new drivers, I got an error saying winload.exe cannot be found, corrupt or lost etc. I somehow managed to extract the files from the Rescue and Recovery that Lenovo offers. I would now like to downgrade my T61 to an XP. I am still getting the winload.exe error, but I can still access BIOS. So can you please tell me what I have to do to go through with this, and what I will lose in the process in terms of Thinkpad software.
Thank you.

[RealBlackStuff]

Contact Lenovo and get a Downgrade-to-XP set of disks for $45.-
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... STA-DWNGRD

Make a set of Vista recovery disks, using R&R, before you downgrade.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-68317

Thousands of people are doing it.

[dinglydoo]

I just contacted Lenovo and they told me that I cannot purchase a downgrade disc due to me not having Vista Business.
I would like to order a Windows XP Home OEM edition and install it on my computer. Will that work?

[ashleys]

Technically I can see no reason.

However, the OEM licenses now appear to be only valid for system builders and not valid for retail customer installation. Does anyone know if this is actually the case ?