I thought I’d gotten it all figured out, but apparently not. I was going to get a Vista-equipped HP dv2000 series and downgrade it to XP. Now I see a story that says you can’t necessarily do that. Now, the dv2000s used to come with XP, but I have no guarantee that the parts have not changed since they started shipping with Vista. (Will Smith warned me of this potential problem). I asked HP if the machine I was looking at could come installed with anything other than Vista, including nothing at all. I was told, robotically, that they come with Vista. So I have no way of knowing if my plan would work or not. If there are no drivers for XP, I’d be screwed — especially since they don’t give you Vista on a CD. It’s just on your hard drive. If I install XP instead and wipe the drive, then I’m left with a Vista-only machine but no copy of Vista. Is it me or would that totally suck?
So now I’m back to looking at Dell, which has a model for about the same price that can come preloaded with XP and can store two batteries at the same time, which I loved on my earlier Dell. (I wore it out.) They use D620s at work so maybe I can get some hands-on time for an afternoon.
I’m terribly vexed. And I guess I’m not ready to buy after all, even though I have some business trips coming up.