“I have new laptop with Vista and wanted o know if I can load XP without formating drive?”
You can, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Best to clean install.
You can’t install XP on a Vista Machine and dual boot without major registry surgury: Not recommended.
You can Install XP first and then Vista over it for a duel boot scenario but it means wiping the drive.
Best bet, if you don’t want to wipe Vista, is to install MS Virtual Machine (Free) and instll XP there. XP will then run in a seperate window under Vista. I run Rockwell software that hasn’t caught up to Vista yet so it has to run in XP. When MS stopped selling XP on new systems (the first time) I came up with the Virtual Machine option. It works (as long as you don’t install the Virtual Machine add-ons).