Can I retrograde to Vista by replacing the HDD in my old laptop?

[1effinday]

Can I retrograde to Vista by replacing the HDD in my old laptop? Win8 and this old chipset won't let me use Minecraft or SecondLife. The puter is a Gateway NV58. Without knowing the danger, I upgraded to Windows8. Both Gateway and intel say they won't make an update for the intel mobile 4 Series Express chipset. So I need to downgrade, but I don't want to format my HDD.

 

[jaguarskx]

Why not simply wipe the current hard drive with Win 8 and install Vista?

Sure you can install a new HDD and Vista if that's the route you wanna take.

 

[1effinday]

Why not simply wipe the current hard drive with Win 8 and install Vista?

Sure you can install a new HDD and Vista if that's the route you wanna take.

I'm not comfortable with a wipe. I've never formatted a disk, and I don't want to lose anything.

 

[kenrivers]

If you don't want to lose data you could create a drive image before wiping the drive. That way you could restore the drive to it's previous state using the drive image. You could also backup the stuff you don't want to lose to an external hard drive. If you are not currently backing up your drive I suggest you start doing so as quickly as possible because if the drive fails you will lose everything.