William...I received my acer aspire 5610 as a gift from my daughter. Yesterday I started following your 4 steps to installing xp. Using the disk mgt wizard on vista I shrunk the partition and allocated a new partition of 8 gb for xp. I ended up re-doing this step as I neglected to remove a flash drive and this caused the partition to be assigned a drive letter of G. I then deleted the new partition, expanded the C and restarted the procedure by rebooting again.

After I got back to recreating the partition again, I saw it wasn't a primary partition, but an extended one. I also saw via disk mgt three existing partitions, one un-named (eisa configure), vista (c drive) and data (d drive)

So using the wizard doesn't give me a primary partition so I need to use some other means to make sure the partition created is a primary one and not an extended partition...Ron