My friend really hates his vista and he is trying to get rid of it and install Windows XP. However everything he tires, even completely reformatting disk does not get rid of it...

Can you think of any ways he can delete it from his computer?

Could you expand a little on the symptoms? If he has reformatted, then it has gone. Is it the bootmng or something similar which is still lurking?

This may sound like a silly question, but has your friend re-formatted the partition that has Vista installed? With new computers, the mfg usually creates a few partitions and the one with Vista on it needs to be formatted. Remember the "DCF" rule:

Delete, Create, Format the partition.

Ive reformatted Vista with no probs!

Recently I've noticed that a few of the major computer manufacturer's are putting their restore partition as the first partition on the drive (the C: partition), leaving the D: partition for the OS.

Hmm... I wonder if that is technically better than putting the restore partition as the second and leaving the first partition for the OS?

I uninstalled my copy of Vista Home Basic only because it Vista is such am memory hog. That and the User Account Control was a major pain in the butt.

So I'm back to XP.

You can use most of the same tweaks that were used in XP to decrease memory usage. The most popular are cutting the color quality back on the Display Settings, and setting the system for "Performance" in the System applet in Control Panel.

UAC can be disabled through a registry tweak or through Group Policy - but it's a small price to pay for the added security that it offers.

thank you everyone for helping me here. I dont know that much technical details because he only told me what i told you. Ill direct him to look here and see if your comments have helped. Thank you.