I've decided to downgrade my laptop from WinXP Home Edition to Win 2K Professional (I need IIS and VS.NET to work). I want to make sure my money's not going to waste, I don't have a lot, so can't afford to make mistakes.

What I'm wondering is:

1) I don't want to format my hard drive. But while installing Win2K, will I have to? The hard drive is NTFS formatted already.

2) Now, a laptop's peripherals and 'features' come with their own drivers. For example, the touchpad would have it's own driver, the LAN card, the monitor perhaps? I do have the CD with all these drivers on it. These will obviously have to be re-installed after installing Win2K. But what I haven't figured out yet is, will I be prompted for the drivers during the Win2K installation, or afterwards?

AND, if they have to be reinstalled afterwards, wouldn't the laptop be rendered obsolete, because there are no drivers for the mouse in the first place? (Confusing, no?)

Or am I simply thinking too paradoxically here? This might, for all I know, turn out to be an issue so trivial that I'm just overlooking it.