July 21, 2008: Vista —> XP downgrade notes
If you have a legit copy of Vista Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate, you can downgrade to XP Professional. Here’s the straight dope:
- Can downgrade the Vista Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate versions only. There are no downgrade rights from other Vista versions. This is true regardless of whether your Vista license is Retail, OEM, or via Select/Open/SA agreements with Microsoft or reseller.
- OEM copies of Vista Business and Enterprise can be downgraded to XP Professional (32 or 64 bit editions) or to XP Tablet Edition.
- Vista Enterprise (available only via Select/Open/SA agreements) can be downgraded to: Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows NT® 4.0, Windows NT 3.51, Windows 98, or Windows 95.
- Microsoft does not provide a disk containing the dowgrade OS, unless you already have access to such via MSDN or Technet. Your OEM vendor may provide such a disk. There’s no guarantee they will do so for free; they may charge you for it.
- No special downgrade disk is needed; you can use any XP install disk you already have. Can be OEM, Retail, System Recovery Disk, etc.
The rollback procedure is:
- Install XP (or other rollback OS version listed above), using its own product key if it calls for one.
- When it comes time to activate, choose the activate by phone method.
- Explain to the support rep that you are downgrading from Vista, and give them the Vista product key.
References:
Microsoft downgrade rights chart (Word format).
How to downgrade from Vista to XP (PC Advisor)
Vista Downgrade Rights (PDF)
