My friend, Quresh, has a Compaq Presario V3500 laptop which has Vista Home Premium Preloaded. He says that vista sux (which i agree) and wants to downgrade to XP. I tried to install XP in his laptop by using a genuine XP home cd but the setup says that it could not detect any hard drive. There is no option of native SATA in his BIOS settings. He really wants XP in his laptop. How can he downgrade? He has this sticker on his laptop.

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Windows XP: The Best Darn Thing Ever

Windows "7" is......... Windows 7

You should have checked with HP before trying to downgrade. You need drivers for the video, sound, modem (if installed), etc. I didn't find any model number 3500 but looking at 350l I found Select software and drivers*. The link is for XP that was already installed on the product. You should call HP and see if it can be done.

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Intel 6320
4 gigs ddr2 ram
160 gig sata
evga 8800 gts video card
vista home premium sp1 - 64 bit

I had the same problem downgrading my Toshiba A200, they really wanted me to keep vista. The way i got around the SATA problem is i found the driver needed for my SATA HD via lots of googling and then slipstreamed the drivers along with the set-up into a blank disk. If you have found the drivers needed and would like the tutorial let me know and ill find/post the link.

Toshiba told my former boss that if she downgraded, she'd void her warranty. She then asked if the warranty would be voided if their staff did the upgrade, they went silent. Also she asked why they offer the same model with XP and XP downgrade options if it would void the warranty. Again, very silent.

Still, go get the drivers, burn them to disk (burn some sata drivers to floppy if you have to have it for the install process, as xp will only read drivers from the floppy drive.

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I'm here, you may now make your next two wishes.

Beat Me, Whip Me, Make Me Use Windows!!

Every Piece of Electronic Equipment runs on a finite amount of smoke. The systems are normally very efficient at reclaiming the smoke and recycling it, however, should you do something to let the smoke out, your system will become useless.

SAVE THE SMOKE !!

New PC :
New: Phenom 9500 Quad 2.2, 4gb ram XP Pro 64-bit (Sata 0), XP Pro 32 bit (sata 1), 40 eide HDD (music), Pioneer Blu-Ray Burner, HP Multidisk CD-RW/DVD-Rom, 2x250 Seagate HDD's, ATI Radeon 3870, Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe WiFi-AP

Old PC:
P4 1.5GHz, 768 Ram, hda-80Gb (80Ubuntu), DVD R/RW

Yeah thats what the salesman told me too, i read through the terms and conditions of the warranty and it didn't say anything about replacing/removing OS's, only tampering with hardware so if they deny me my free repairs, ima go yellin'

they can't deny the warranty to put on something they sell... you can go from one legal OS to another, it won't void the hardware warranty.

__________________
I'm here, you may now make your next two wishes.

Beat Me, Whip Me, Make Me Use Windows!!

Every Piece of Electronic Equipment runs on a finite amount of smoke. The systems are normally very efficient at reclaiming the smoke and recycling it, however, should you do something to let the smoke out, your system will become useless.

SAVE THE SMOKE !!

New PC :
New: Phenom 9500 Quad 2.2, 4gb ram XP Pro 64-bit (Sata 0), XP Pro 32 bit (sata 1), 40 eide HDD (music), Pioneer Blu-Ray Burner, HP Multidisk CD-RW/DVD-Rom, 2x250 Seagate HDD's, ATI Radeon 3870, Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe WiFi-AP

Old PC:
P4 1.5GHz, 768 Ram, hda-80Gb (80Ubuntu), DVD R/RW

He has all the drivers needed...next?

__________________
Windows XP: The Best Darn Thing Ever

Windows "7" is......... Windows 7

this is the tutorial i followed: here.
It's very simple to follow and works like a charm. Hope it works for you too.