An idea for moving from Vista to XP

[psycacti]

Imagine.
I just bought a laptop and only after the purchase was complete did I notice it has VISTA installed. Glaring oversight! How could I have been so foolish!?
Anyway, I definitely want to use XP instead, so I was thinking about this as a way to "retrograde:"

Set up a partition for an XP Dual-boot and work out all the kinks with drivers, etc. while leaving VISTA installed. Then, once I have XP working smoothly, simply erase VISTA from its partition and expand the XP partition to cover the whole disk.

Is this a viable tactic?
I don't have a lot of experience in this realm, so any feedback on caveats I should be aware of would be much appreciated.
Thanks!

[Solomon]

It will be better of if you uninstall Windows Vista completely and use Windows XP itself. as you are looking ahead to work on Windows XP itself then there is actually no need to create a Dual Boot partition. I suggest you un-install Windows Vista. I have used Windows Vista and have to admit that Windows Xp is much better then Windows Vista. If you want to upgrade I will suggest you go for Windows 7 instead of Windows Vista.

[psycacti]

Formatting and clean install of XP was my original thought, but after poking around a little I learned that it may not be as easy as that, so I thought I could just leave Vista on a small partition so I could use it for internet connectivity in the case that I run into a snag or something.

I don't know. I just really Really REALLY don't want to use Vista...

Also, is it true that I can't use the XP disc from my old computer to install on my new one? I remember reading that somewhere. As much as I don't want to use Vista, I can't imagine ever buying a brand new copy of XP. Maybe I'll have to go the way of the penguin on this...