[jadefox]

I recently purchased an HP Pavilion 9260 laptop. It's a nice machine, but it came with Windows Vista, which uses quite a bit of RAM. This laptop has 2GB of RAM, and with the default installation, Windows Vista takes about 950mb of RAM without running any applications. This seems bad, I don't want half my RAM to be used up without even running anything. I managed to get that down to about 560mb by disabling some services, but I would like to remove Windows Vista and install Windows XP on this laptop, since XP uses much less memory. My concern is drivers - is there good driver support for Windows XP for this laptop?

[__Camouflage__]

I'm sure there would be. Use AIDA32 and look at all your hardware and search around, or go to the HP website and look at the hardware.

[mikee]

you shouldn't have any problems with vista, it may use alot of ram but as programs start to open and use ram vista's processes get moved to the page file. my computer only uses about 500 mb of ram with some programs opened and as I open more other stuff just moves to the page file.