My dad had two laptops. The one that he bought himself came loaded with XP, and he then got another one that came with Vista when he signed up to an energy company. Because he had had the XP one for so long, and not being even slightly computer savvy, and being, in the nicest possible sense, an old dog who refuses to learn new tricks, he hates the Vista laptop. The screen on the XP laptop was broken in so many places that he could hardly see anything, but he loved that laptop. Because of the XP.

The XP laptop died over Christmas, in quite spectacular fashion. Most people with two laptops would just move on, but my dad is bereft and I want to make it right for him.

Mum and dad only use the laptop for sending emails to distant relatives, very casually surfing the internet and storing photos. They don't need bells and whistles

How easy would it be for me to take Vista off the other laptop and put XP on to it? What would it actually involve? Because Dad hates it so much, he hasn't been keeping up with the Vista updates and that laptop is horribly slow - but on the other hand, it does still work at the moment; if uninstalling Vista and putting XP on to it is going to kill that laptop too I don't want to do it

Also, because both laptops came preloaded, I haven't got an XP installation disc - would it be as simple as buying a new one and just loading it on?

I'm sorry this is such a long post, and hope that this is the right place for it. And thank you in advance for your help.

The problem is drivers. On a PC, it most likely would be as simple as you suggest. But with notebooks, it may not be that simple. Notebooks tend to be very proprietary and so before even thinking of doing this, visit the notebook maker's site to ensure there are XP drivers out there.

That said, it would be better to go forward rather than back. That is, it would be much better to install Windows 7 on that machine instead of XP. XP was designed over 10 years ago to support software and hardware from 10 years before that - and it was designed when security was an afterthought. Windows 7 was designed for today's hardware with security a primary issue.

And thing is Vista was basically a flop. Windows 7 is much improved over Vista and therefore much easier to use. Yes, if used to XP, there's still that learning curve that stubborn users must get over, but many of the screens can be set up to look and behave (more or less) like the classic XP screens.

Same deal applies about drivers though - you have to make sure the hardware maker has Windows 7 drivers - though typically Vista and Windows 7 use the same drivers. To ensure the notebook will support Windows 7 it is best to check with the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.

As far as that XP license, that does look legitimate but it says it is an Upgrade license which means it likely is expecting to see Windows 95/98 and not Vista. So not sure that would work.