[911ctS]

First of all, I'm sorry to bother everyone with a technical computer question but I really need advice. I'm not a computer specialist in any way so dont be too hard on me.

I recently went out and bought my first laptop. It is a sony vaio that has a duo core intel 2.0 processor, 3 gigs or RAM, a 256 NViDIA graphics card, and a 250 gig hard drive. My sole purpose of buying this machine was to be able to do my business from various locations. I guess I was in need of a more powerful device than my old dell anyway.

Ok so here is the problem... Windows Vista. At first it seemed like a pretty nice program, despite it asking me three times if I was sure that I wanted to carry out any particular command, but I can live with that. I think the layout is fairly nice as it seems to be more creative and similar to a current mac than the previous windows programs were. So I began to install my engineering programs like Solidworks and AutoCAD and to my astonishment they dont seem to work with Vista at all! After contacting some people and reading a bit online I have come to the conclusion that Vista is not compatable with virtually any of the engineering programs, especially ones that are not current 2008 versions. Going out and buying these 2008 versions would not only run me thousands of dollars, but it would be redundant as the slightly older ones (05, 06, 07) work just as well. I honestly find it hard to believe that Microsoft would make such an O.S. that basically omits older programs from being compatable with it but they seem to have done just that.

So I guess my question is would you suggest backdating to a version of XP? I do own a copy of XP and would really like to install it on this new laptop. Is there any way to retain Vista on a CD in case I want to use it later? Also, how would I go about formatting the hard drive clean and doing a fresh install of XP? I have tried every way that I know and no luck so far.

Thank you for any suggestions you may have.