Will this work?
 

Basically, I have a laptop with no optical drive running Vista. This is what I want to do if possible.

1) Put the HDD in my other laptop
2) Backup the Vista install to disc just in case
3) Use GPartEd to split the HDD into 2 partitions
4) Still in my other laptop, install XP performance edition
5) Swap it back to the original laptop
6) Make sure I can get drivers for everything
7) Hide the Vista partition from the bootloader (This will be my moms laptop so I want it going straight to XP)

Can I do all that? I remember from a computers class I had to take that after you install windows, if you change more than X number of pieces of hardware, you have to reinstall or something like that? Or would there be serious driver issues from installing on one computer and moving to another?

TIA

Might work. More likely than not, it won't like the change of hardware. Unless you know the motherboard and cpu are the same, windows will probably cough and die on you with a5blue screen.

You should look into an external optical drive perhaps? They're not expensive these days.
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=41503
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.p...acture=Samsung

Completely different, the only similarities between these two is they both have AMD processors.

I'm gonna phone up The Source today and check their exchange policy, they have a lot of netbooks for the same price right now but this is the only one with an 11.6" screen, the rest are all 10.1"

I suspect that even if it works, you will have stability issues later on. If you don't care about the data, I guess its worth a shot. worst case scenario, you lose the data on the drive.

^ well the main problem would be that if it gets really pissed at me, I can't recover to Vista as there's no optical drive. If it was mine I'd toss on some Linux from USB and call it a day but it's for my mom so I want to stick to Windows. Vista runs surprisingly well on it but I know XP/7 would run better.

I would install XP in the host computer from a USB Stick. You probably have a USB stick already.

why not just install xp from a usb flash drive?

did a quick google search and this is what came up (not sure if it works):
http://www.vandomburg.net/installing...s-xp-from-usb/

Yes I have a USB stick, a 4GB one, but I dont have an exact XP cd that goes with my serials, so I was going to use XP Performance Edition.

I found that tutorial too, but it says this:

So that's a no-go.

If strange things are happening it's very unlikely it's caused by the USB media format.

ya a usb install is identical so as long the mobo supports booting from it. try this:
http://wintoflash.com/home/en/

i've installed xp, vista, and win 7 original and slipstreamed stuff on all three os's. it's SOO much faster

^ thanks, Ill try that out. Now I just need to get GPartEd on usb, and hope for drivers.