Vitter

(sry, quoted you!)

You hit the nail on the head. What you will need to do is slipstream sp2 onto your xp disc(if it isn't already in your disc), then install it. Again, only if your HDD is SATA. There is also some storage cap(120GB) for xp when you don't have any SP on it, but thats another issue altogether, as not many laptop users are affected by it(IE don't have a larger HDD than an 80GB).

Alternatively if your HDD is SATA, there(usually) is a setting in the bios that can let you use your sata drives as if they were IDE, thus making slipstreaming sp2 into your XP copy a non-issue.

To slipstream a service pack onto your disc you will need to download the SP2 "for IT professionals" from the Microsoft website, then use a nifty program called 'nlite'(google it, its free), run it, and it will guide you through the steps.

*huff* *puff* *wheeze*

And thats only on the SATA issue. Moving on...

Vista is about 17% slower on most benchmarks than XP. The trade-off is Vista is (supposedly) more stable. When you say you computer is getting slower as you install the usual programs the most likely cause is all this bloatware included when installing components that are not necessary (but for your "benefit" as described by most vendors). You can generally disable them by right-clicking on the icons in the system tray and telling them to not start at boot-up. Other options include deleting entries in your start menu under 'startup' [start>all programs>startup], as most of the programs that put themselves in there help you to boot-up a particular application in the event that you use them(IE kodak easyshare). Another way to diable programs from boot-up is the ever-popular start>run>'type msconfig' to disable some peskier programs, but I try not to use it whenever possible.

Other causes for your computer becoming slow would be virus/spyware, but i'm not going to delve into those as I'm sure there is a seperate topic concerning that.