Uninstalling Vista / Installing XP on Toshiba P105-S6217

[incucrash]

I've had Vista for about 6 months and the drivers being released are taking forever, and seem to cause more problems then they fix. My older laptop with a less powerful processor and built in video runs video games better.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131026-pg,1/article.html

Questions: Toshiba specific, do they yank the warranty if you install windows xp? 6 months left so, it's whatever...

What do I need to do, from start to finish?

Will the biometric fingerprint reader still work on xp, granted I find the driver?

If I mess up, what exactly do the included recovery disks do? EG: If there is nothing on the HD, it's wiped clean, will the recovery disks put me back in Vista?


Looking for someone with a Satellite/Toshiba laptop who has successfully installed Windows XP in place of Vista, or.... how can I tweak out Vista and get things running better? I downloaded the latest Bios Flash, and the video drivers made things run horrible so I rolled back....

thanks in advance, sorry for the jumbled post, I just want to unlock this laptops potential...

 

[blackjack]

Back up everything first, just in case.
best to print out
Disconnect from the net and don`t reconnect, until you have your firewall software installed.

1 Restart your computer and go to setup usually by pressing the F2 or delete key.

2 Once you get into setup look for the boot menu and make sure you set it to boot from CD first followed by your hard drive.

3 Put the Windows xp disk into your CD drive.

4 Now save your settings and exit setup.

5 While your computer is booting you will see a message that says "press any key to boot from CD" press any key.

6 When the welcome to setup screen appears press enter and then press F8 to accept the Microsoft license agreement.

7 You will be prompted to repair an installation press the escape key.

8 Now select the partition that you want to reformat and press the D key to delete it you will be asked to confirm that you want to delete the partition.

9 Now press C to create a brand new partition you will be asked what size you want the partition to be in mega bytes. If you just press enter then the partition will be the maximum size that you can have. This is perfectly OK if you don`t want to create multiple partitions.

10 You will now be asked to format the partition select the ntfs file system and do a full format.

11 Once the format is complete setup will continue.

Your computer will restart during the remaining setup again you will be asked to press any key to boot from CD DO NOT PRESS ANYTHING and setup will continue. Once the setup is complete and you are back in Windows remove the Windows CD from your CD drive.

Install your firewall software and reconnect to the net. Install whatever drivers you need, then run Windows updates.

Finally, install whatever programs/software you want.

I think that will work, I installed VISTA last week messing about ( full install)then tried to go back via Norton ghost, it restored the file but the boot loader was all messed up so I had to run the recovery console from the XP disc then when I got to the command prompt type 1 FIXBOOT THEN ENTER, 2 FIXMBR THEN ENTER, then reboot and voila it booted straight into my ghost image id restored, boot up full working and no more sill boot sequence you get with Vista( this was a desktop PC though).