Hi I want to remove Windows 8 and go back to windows XP.

You can't boot to the CD because of the way that Win8 shuts down. Simply put, on shut down, it puts itself in a state of hibernation, which allows it to boot quickly, but also prevents booting from another device on the initial boot.
The good news is, it doesn't do that on a reboot, so all you have to do is put the CD in the drive once Win8 is up, then do a reboot. Then the "Press any key . . ." should work.

You may get all kinds of error messages about "There's a newer OS", etc., when you go to reinstall XP. Please note that XP is not supported any more by Microsoft, and you'll have to install service pack 3 to get any security updates for it. You might be better off explaining what problems you are having with Win8 now, and possibly the community can help you with them instead of rolling back to an extinct OS (don't get me wrong; I loved XP, and never even moved my desktop to Win7 until right before Win8 came out).

If you don't like the new Win8 interface, there are ways to get around that, and make your PC look and act like Win7 or WinXP. Here's a pretty comprehensive list of third-party programs that'll do that for you:
   <http://social.Technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w8itprogeneral/thread/b5f19449-f992-466b-b549-ce1452fd5a39#b5f19449-f992-466b-b549-ce1452fd5a39>

And my personal favorite method:
Ex7forW8 <http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/35189-Windows-7-explorer-for-Windows-8>

Start8 ($5)  <http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/> and Classic Shell (free)   <http://www.classicshell.net/> seem to be two of the more popular ones.

I wish you luck with whatever you choose, but I would advise fixing and sticking with Win8 (I never thought I'd ever say that), if for nothing else than because sooner or later you're going to come across something you want that will refuse to run in WinXP.

---

 SC Tom

 Please note that XP is not supported any more by Microsoft,

Windows XP is in extended support until April 2014.....

Thanks SC Tom for the detailed reply and the advice.   I will give your suggestion a try to get it to install xp from cd.    Hope it works.    I know that xp has a limited life left, but I thought that I would go back to it until I have to upgrade by which time windows 8 may have resolved the issues.     I agree that I do not like he look and feel of windows 8 and sometimes I get into a screen that has no obvious way of getting out of (i.e esc does not get rid of it).   

I get regular automatic reboots and one night earlier this week I was getting reboots every 15 minutes (must have experienced about 30 + times that evening).    windows 8 could not find my cd drive earlier today (yet it was in device manager) a reboot fixed that.          When I try to shut it down in the evening it goes to the shutting down screen and it is still shutting down next morning (8 hours later) so more often than not I have to kill the session with the reset button, when it says on shutting down for over an hour.     I added a usb stick in this morning and it could not see it on explorer.   a re-boot fixed that.    

I regularly have explorer issues when I click on e.g my cd drive or one of the other HD drives and a band starts in the explorer path name bar that gradually fills the whole of the bar but still does not display the contents of the drive that I am trying to view.     I click on software on the desktop and some will just not load even when I choose file / open.    one package that I tried to open several times did not display but several occurances were found to be running in task manager but 'End task' would not kill the sessions no matter how many times I tried to kill the tasks.     My mouse often freezes on the screen too.   It usually reboots then.

I really miss safe mode.  I know that you can access it from within windows advanced settings but if windows will not boot up.......?

I really miss the start button etc.   I know that you can get skins that you gave me links for that can make windows 8 look like the older versions, but I worry that using them could open up insecurities as they may not be Microsoft approved.

I loved xp so I will go back to it (if windows 8 will let me) until Microsoft pulls support.   By then perhaps Windows 8 may have ironed some of these issues out.    I had hoped to persevere with windows 8 as it is likely to be the future, but I have spent too many hours searching google trying to get me out of situations. such as how to stop secure boot to enable my pc to use the cd drive to install xp.  

I better post this quickly before it automatically reboots again.

Thanks again.



 

I suspect that the machine you installed Windows 8 on is not compatible - that's probably the problem. Any machine that was running XP is quite probably not suitable for Windows 8 anyway...

I was more inclined to assume that it may be down to the fact that I paid for an Win 8 upgrade to XP pro rather than a clean install of Windows 8 (full disk / full install).    I have seen comments online about Win 8 upgrades giving issues that clean installs seem to avoid.