Installing XP on new laptop with Vista pre-installed

tehone

gaming_guy wrote: »

i tend to find VMs are slower than the host machine

I know - I think personally it would be best to leave the existing Vista installed on the laptop, the VM was just a random thought for running XP without having to dual boot or install.

I think most people will find that on a new laptop nowadays that Vista is a better, faster choice than XP Pro.

Millionaire

esuhl wrote: »

Mainly because it runs slower than XP (from personal experience - even with SP1), and if she has any problems, I'm much more familiar with XP so it would be easier to help out with any problems - particularly over the phone.

What Spec is it? How much ram is it running?

As its a new pc I'm suspecting it's got a whole load of rubbish pre-installed from manufacturer.

If you have the Vista Discs you could always do a clean reinstall and go from there to clear all the rubbish that has been preloaded on.

Then it is possible to "tweak" Vista to run just as fast as XP.

[Deleted User]

Millionaire wrote: »

What Spec is it? How much ram is it running?

As its a new pc I'm suspecting it's got a whole load of rubbish pre-installed from manufacturer.

If you have the Vista Discs you could always do a clean reinstall and go from there to clear all the rubbish that has been preloaded on.

Then it is possible to "tweak" Vista to run just as fast as XP.

From the link in the top post, the laptop has 2GB of RAM. Easily enough to enjoy smooth sailing in Vista.

Conor_3

anewhope wrote: »

From the link in the top post, the laptop has 2GB of RAM. Easily enough to enjoy smooth sailing in Vista.

It'll be Norton/McAfacrap and Norton Ghost slowing the job down then.

esuhl

Thanks, all. A VM wouldn't be ideal as the main purpose for using XP would be to improve performance.

I've been pretty busy and am running out of time to get XP installed, so I might leave Vista for now. I've removed a lot of junk, so it's running at a decent speed (though it takes a while to boot and absolutely thrashes the hard disk for the first five or ten minutes after booting, despite it being defragmented and having most of the resident/startup programs disabled). Oh, and I've disabled all the annoying, performance-sapping visual effects too.

The laptop has a 2.0GHz, 800MHz FSB, 4MB L2 cache CPU and 2GB RAM, so although it's looking pretty good with Vista, I can't help thinking that XP would run a lot faster...

[Deleted User]

esuhl wrote: »

Thanks, all. A VM wouldn't be ideal as the main purpose for using XP would be to improve performance.

I've been pretty busy and am running out of time to get XP installed, so I might leave Vista for now. I've removed a lot of junk, so it's running at a decent speed (though it takes a while to boot and absolutely thrashes the hard disk for the first five or ten minutes after booting, despite it being defragmented and having most of the resident/startup programs disabled). Oh, and I've disabled all the annoying, performance-sapping visual effects too.

The laptop has a 2.0GHz, 800MHz FSB, 4MB L2 cache CPU and 2GB RAM, so although it's looking pretty good with Vista, I can't help thinking that XP would run a lot faster...

You'll find in the first infancy of a Vista build that there is an abnormal amount of thrashing on the disks and it won't be running at it's optimum while Superfetch, Readyboost and the indexing services are all doing what they need to in order to optimise use of the machine.

With a decent computer any speed difference is negligible, if not Vista slipping ahead.

Inactive

esuhl wrote: »

I can't help thinking that XP would run a lot faster...

I,m sure it would.;)

Millionaire

esuhl wrote: »

Thanks, all. A VM wouldn't be ideal as the main purpose for using XP would be to improve performance.

I've been pretty busy and am running out of time to get XP installed, so I might leave Vista for now. I've removed a lot of junk, so it's running at a decent speed (though it takes a while to boot and absolutely thrashes the hard disk for the first five or ten minutes after booting, despite it being defragmented and having most of the resident/startup programs disabled). Oh, and I've disabled all the annoying, performance-sapping visual effects too.

The laptop has a 2.0GHz, 800MHz FSB, 4MB L2 cache CPU and 2GB RAM, so although it's looking pretty good with Vista, I can't help thinking that XP would run a lot faster...

I can totally understand the disk thrashing, It annoys the hell out of me and I remember moaning about it on here ages ago.:D

Out of the box I found Vista to be awful due to the crap that Manufacturers preload and also some of Vista's Settings.

However you can get Vista performing very well in-deed by "tweaking" a few settings.

I have 2 Laptops running Vista and out of the box they were awful. However I have them running like a dream now without having to mess with the visual effects.

One is running on a 1.6ghz Dual Core and another on a 2.0ghz Core2Duo both with 2Gb Ram. As you can see they are lower spec than what you have and I can get them to boot fully in less than 50secs without any disk thrashing

This is what I reckon you should do.

Follow this guide to kill the disk thrashing, works wonders. I did upto the first 5 pages. You will see a huge difference but make sure you read what effect each one has on disabling.

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2262


Kill all Startup entries unless necessary. Type "msconfig" in search and open up then startup up tab.

You can kill almost all apart from a few like Av and touchpad drivers. I only have around 5 ticked and around 15 disabled.

You can check what is required and what not here,

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/startups/

Just type the extension in and it will tell you what its for and if required. most are not so can be turned off.

Get rid of the likes of Norton and Mcafee, they are awful resource hogs. Get one of the free AV etc or if you dont mind paying I would recommend Eset Smart Security which is what I use. Lightest AV suite I have ever used.

esuhl

The indexing service is disabled (I'm going to look through the other services tonight to see what else I can disable), and I've deleted anything non-essential from the "Run" keys in HKLM & HKCU in the registry, and created shortcuts to the files instead. I don't use Readyboost so maybe it's just Superfetch setting itself up... unless Avira Antivir (which I used to replace Norton) is causing any problems.

Cheers for the suggestion of Eset/NOD32 - I *would* pay for it, but... I have 5 PCs at home, 4 at work, and this laptop isn't even mine anyway, so that's a lot of licences to buy!

I'll read through the pcstats.com guide when I get back to see if there's anything else I can tweak...

Thanks again, one and all!

Millionaire

esuhl wrote: »

The indexing service is disabled (I'm going to look through the other services tonight to see what else I can disable), and I've deleted anything non-essential from the "Run" keys in HKLM & HKCU in the registry, and created shortcuts to the files instead. I don't use Readyboost so maybe it's just Superfetch setting itself up... unless Avira Antivir (which I used to replace Norton) is causing any problems.

Cheers for the suggestion of Eset/NOD32 - I *would* pay for it, but... I have 5 PCs at home, 4 at work, and this laptop isn't even mine anyway, so that's a lot of licences to buy!

I'll read through the pcstats.com guide when I get back to see if there's anything else I can tweak...

Thanks again, one and all!

Esuhl, Avira Antivir I have found to be one of the the best free ones available, Very high Detection rates and very light on resources so I dont think that should be a problem.

The Indexing and Superfetch does churnway quite a bit intially but I personally found it annoying as it will still do it further down the line. I personally disabled it as it really does not effect the way I use the computer.

However, if you change the battery setting to "power saver" its been said that it stops it from churning away when idle to preserve battery life and then just adjust the other power settings to how is required.

I also disabled some services from the following guide. Read through and decide if they are required or not. I diasbled any that did not affect my usage.

http://www.vistarewired.com/2007/02/18/services


Hope some of the recommendations help anyway.