I did something like this:
1. In Vista, burn a driver & application recovery DVD (probably not necessary)
2. (Make sure nothing important is on the main HDD partition)
3. Put in an XP CD, restart, choose the boot menu on startup and pick to boot from the CD/DVD drive
4. Choose to setup XP on the main partition - quick reformat as NTFS. You should only have to choose to boot from the CD once. Then after the HDD is reformatted, and XP setup does the first phase, it should automatically boot to that HDD partition to continue setup. Note: I kept the 2nd (Recovery) partition untouched, I only reformatted the main ~140GB partition.
Drivers: I found most of them on the Gateway site, by looking up MT3705 drivers for Windows XP. Here are the file/ download names, if you search Gateway's site (or Google) you should be able to find them:
D00560-002-001 (Audio driver)
D00671-001-001 (ATI/ Chipset drivers). Note: I'm actually using the "Radeon Omega drivers" right now for video, it was the easiest way to give me a few more resolutions to choose from.
D00669-001-001 (Touchpad driver/ utility - not as important
Ethernet:
http://www.marvell.com/drivers/upload/yk51x86_v86173.zip
Wireless Net: Don't remember where I got it, google for "RTL8185 XP drivers", the directory name I have saved w/ drivers is called "x86-8185(1094)"
I'd try to find all of those drivers beforehand, then burn them to a CD or something before going ahead with the install. (Definitely find the wired/ wireless networking drivers before hand - having the XP SP2 network install sitting around beforehand is a good step also, before hooking up to the internet -
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta...-4F30-8245-9E368D3CDB5A&displaylang=en
)
I hope that helps a little.