Businesses with volume licenses or software assurance that covers Windows can go back to XP or even earlier versions of Windows regardless of when they purchase a Windows 7 machine.

Microsoft reiterated that this policy applies to the Windows license that comes with new PCs. Rather than a six-month window, as originally planned, the window will extend to either 18 months from the Windows 7 launch or until the release of the first service pack of Windows 7, whichever comes first. Update, 5:00 p.m.: A Microsoft representative said late Tuesday that the company has decided to extend the period for which Windows 7 machines will be eligible to downgrade to XP. The laptop is HP Pavilion g6-1c31nr with: 2.5GHz/1.9GHz. While the downgrading option opened up the possibility of getting the beloved Windows 7 or the Windows Vista back in your PC, Microsoft does not allow you to downgrade to the widely used yet being pushed for retirement, Windows XP. You can’t simply insert the Windows XP installation CD media into the CD-ROM drive and hope to ‘upgrade’ and replace the Windows Vista with Windows XP usual install routine because Vista won’t allow it to be overwritten. Silver also said the six-month rule will create a huge administrative headache for businesses trying to determine which of their machines can legally run XP. 1 Windows 7 is not very stable on my laptop so I want to downgrade Win7 to Windows 2000 or clean install Win2000 on the laptop. There is no direct path to downgrade from Windows Vista to Windows XP. 'With Vista, a lot of people brought in machines with XP and had no intention (to move to Vista) or eventually lost that inclination to upgrade to Vista.'

'I think it will be more temporary than with Vista,' he said, referring to the downgrade phenomenon.

Downgrading windows 7 to windows vista