Finally! After months of wrangling with my wife, I got her a new laptop. Her old one was slow, inept, and the power supplies we would buy off of eBay would melt after a few months of use. What provoked the sudden purchase? Finding a computer that was able to be downgraded to Windows XP.
It's true. Any new computer you buy this day has Windows Vista onboard, which to anyone who has taken the time to use it, is a real headache. Vista is a resource hog, not friendly with many existing applications, and is worse than a nagging wife (not mine of course) about every operation you perform on it.
After some research, I found that I could buy a HP dv9207us laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium at a pretty decent price (It also helped that I was able to unload my old laptop on someone else for $300). It included a ton of extras including a TV Tuner card, HDMI support and what my wife calls a 'cute remote' that is the size of a credit card. One problem though, if you try to get any XP drivers for it, none are available.
However, this never stopped me from getting them. I figured that since this was a 'close out' model, that there would have to be some laptops in the same product family that originally had XP on them. Gold mine! Since the hardware was virtually the same, finding drivers was a snap.
I dropped a Windows XP Media Center 2005 disc in the drive, only to find out that it needed some SATA drivers for the hard disk, but less than a half hour later I built myself a slip-streamed DVD with everything on it. Everything else went without a hitch, and BANG!, I got myself a brand new laptop WITHOUT Vista. Now, I did make the backup discs, so that when Vista matures a bit more, I can just drop my restore disc in and enjoy Vista in the future.
Oh, and by the way, this isn't an April Fool's joke.