Microsoft help anyone!

[Steve]

I have a laptop which is a little over twelve months old. It was installed with Vista Business from new.
Having wiped the hard drive, I have lost the install files. HP will not send me the Vista disks out as my 12 month warranty has expired and microsoft don't want to know and refer you back to the vendor!

Does anyone have a clue how I can resolve this? Cheers!

[am]

Kill Vista and put Xp on it !!

A

[Steve]

Well I did try that, but if you have ever installed XP on a Vista machine it is not that easy.
I had to download the bespoke SCSI driver for the laptop and then transfer it to a floppy disk (remember them!), then XP installs a driver for a USB floppy drive to enable the SCSI driver to be installed.


After all that......it didn't work properly!

I am currently running a version of Vista Ultimate for which I have no licence key and have to reinstall every 30 days!! Don't mind in saying this as I do have a licence for Vista Business and so do not consider myself to be an illegal user - just frustrated!

[JS]

Get yourself a copy of a recent build of "Black XP"

[blondeviking]

My advice is to get a friend who works in the I.T. Dept for a company to take ur laptop to work with them 1 day + get them to sort it out for you ;-)

[DJones]

You could just take the decision to get rid of microsoft products and install another operating system like Ubuntu or any of the other linux based systems.

No fee's to pay, completely free, comes with Open Office as an alternative to Microsoft Office, uses firefox for web browsing, Evolution or Thunderbird for email.

You can download an .iso file to burn onto a cd and use that to test by running direct from the cd without installing.

Maybe worth a thought.

[Peter]

Well I did try that, but if you have ever installed XP on a Vista machine it is not that easy.
I had to download the bespoke SCSI driver for the laptop and then transfer it to a floppy disk (remember them!), then XP installs a driver for a USB floppy drive to enable the SCSI driver to be installed.
After all that......it didn't work properly!
I am currently running a version of Vista Ultimate for which I have no licence key and have to reinstall every 30 days!! Don't mind in saying this as I do have a licence for Vista Business and so do not consider myself to be an illegal user - just frustrated!

I got so frustrated with Microsoft I got a Mac!